Investigation, Detection and Prevention of Online Child Sexual Abuse Materials: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Child sexual abuse inflicts lifelong devastating consequences for victims and is an ongoing social concern. In most countries, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) distribution is illegal. As a result, there are many research papers in the literature which proposed technologies to detect and investigate CSAM. In this survey, a comprehensive search of the peer-reviewed journal and conference paper databases (including preprints) is conducted to identify high-quality literature. We use the PRISMA methodology to refine our search space to 2,761 papers published by Springer, Elsevier, IEEE and ACM. After iterative reviews of title, abstract and full text for relevance to our topics, 43 papers are included for full review. Our paper provides a comprehensive synthesis of the tasks of the current research and how the papers use techniques and datasets to solve their tasks and evaluate their models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to focus exclusively on online CSAM detection and prevention with no geographic boundaries, and the first survey to review papers published after 2018. It can be used by researchers to identify gaps in knowledge and relevant publicly available datasets that may be useful for their research.

Transparency reporting on child sexual exploitation and abuse online

“…Possession of objectionable content is punishable by imprisonment of up to 10 years while distributing objectionable content, such as making the content available for other people to access online, carries a maximum term of imprisonment of up to 14 years. The New Zealand Crimes Act 1961, Section 98AA (New Zealand, Ministry of Justice, 2021 [88]), was also updated in 2015 to criminalise domestic trafficking and some aspects of grooming.…”

“…The New Zealand Crimes Act 1961, Section 98AA (New Zealand, Ministry of Justice, 2021 [88]), covers child sexual exploitation and trafficking in other jurisdictions. A person who sells, buys, barters, rents, hires or in any other way enters into an arrangement involving a person under 18 years for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation can be sentenced up to 14 years in jail.…”