The difficult issue of age assessment on pedo-pornographic material

Sexual Abuse

“…This statement is also confirmed by an experimental study performed in Italy and Germany which verified the great variability and error of an age evaluation based on sexual characteristics. Eleven images representing pornographic scenes involving adults were shown to a group of forensic pathologists, paediatricians and gynaecologists: results showed that paediatricians and gynaecologists, who are used to applying Tanner stages in their clinical practice, reported the highest percentage of errors, wrongly identifying the represented subjects as juveniles (Cattaneo et al 2009). Sexual development has proved to be too variable (also considering different geographic contexts) and therefore unreliable for age estimation for forensic purposes.…”

Juvenile age estimation from facial images

“…In cases involving pornographic images suspected to depict children, it is of great importance to be able to assess if the individual in the image is indeed a child, thus indicating the crime of child sexual abuse (CSA) (3). A more precise age is often required to determine the severity of offender sentencing and may be used in the identification of the victim (4,5). Age evaluations could aid the sequencing of images, when there are several images present which have been taken over a period of time (6).…”

“…The availability of child pornographic images has grown exponentially with the development of the internet resulting in millions of images of CSA, which are shared and downloaded online (4,7,8). Consequently, there has been a rise in the number of cases in which an expert has been called upon to give an age assessment from a photograph of alleged CSA (4,5).…”

“…Consequently, there has been a rise in the number of cases in which an expert has been called upon to give an age assessment from a photograph of alleged CSA (4,5). Experts may include individuals such as paediatricians, gynaecologists, forensic pathologists or forensic anthropologists (3,4), although this remains a very contentious area with only very recent attempts to provide guidelines for use in age estimation from photographic images (9-11).…”

“…However, studies have shown that age estimation from secondary sexual characteristics is inaccurate, with wide variability in the choice of features believed to be most important in age assessment (8). Growth and sexual maturation can be affected by many factors such as environmental factors, obesity and malnutrition, population differences and even individual biology can influence the rate and timing of sexual maturation (4,5,13). In addition, the assessment of sexual maturation may be confused, as adults may remove features such as pubic and axillary hair in order to appear younger.…”