Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Uncategorized

Description: Child Rescue Coalition (CRC) is a non-profit organisation that rescues children from sexual abuse by “building technology for law enforcement, free of charge, to identify, arrest and prosecute child predators.”1 Childlight proposes to use CRC data to better understand the global data picture on the prevalence and nature of online child sex abuse exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) – specifically the sharing of child sex abuse material (CSAM) on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is the content, images, videos and sound clips which are created from the sexual abuse/exploitation of children. Accessing, sharing and creating this material is a crime in most countries. Beyond this its continued availability is a source of continued harm to the children depicted in the abuse and exploitation. It is a prevalent crime that will likely grow and diversify with the development of new technological environments such as extended reality spaces. From population-based data globally, evidence shows as many as one in four adults have experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen (One in Four, 2024); and 5-12% of all internet-active children experienced some form of sexual exploitation (ECPAT, 2018, 2020; INTERPOL, 2023; NSPCC, 2022; WHO, 2022). Childlight’s research indicates that 12.6% of children have been victims of non-consensual taking, sharing and exposure to sexual images and video in the past year (Into the Light Index by Childlight). This proposal is to work with CRC’s collected data on CSAM shared through P2P networks. CRC has more than ten years’ experience in collecting and processing data in relation to OCSEA. CRC’s core technology has indexed over 23 billion records from various unregulated online spaces, particularly P2P data sharing networks, where criminals trade CSAM.    CRC data provides a unique geographical insight into the scale, threat and availability of CSAM on the open web. It has been given, free of charge, to law enforcement colleagues in over 100 countries around the world. CRC notes that the UK has exploited the technology to the greatest effect and has led the world in targeting offenders who upload, share and view CSAM.   P2P networks are a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers including files, disk storage capacity, and network bandwidth. Peers are equal within the network and a P2P network is created when two or more computers are connected and share resources without going through a separate server computer.    CRC’s dataset has the advantage of being one of the only global datasets on CSAM content within P2P networks. CRC data is classified as big data gathered specifically for law enforcement/intelligence purposes and has not specifically been designed for research. The CSAM is flagged by filenames and other identifiers (such as IP addresses) (Childlight will not have access to any imagery). This study will not store any CSAM or analyse any CSAM material. This is a study of metadata: numbers of IP addresses and filenames.   Data analyses provide evidence to drive more effective prevention and response strategies and policies that directly safeguard children from sexual abuse and exploitation globally. Childlight will contribute to this evidence, through several analyses of the sharing of CSAM in CRC data. In order to understand the global trends of CSAM-sharing, the number of IP addresses sharing CSAM between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024 will be analysed per country/region. This is to give a general overview per country; and globally. Moreover, the sharing of CSAM will be examined in humanitarian crises. We will accomplish this by observing how CSAM-sharing changes over time by observing trends in the numbers of IP addresses sharing CSAM shared per country (which is experiencing; or has experienced; a humanitarian crisis in the last ten years); and at various timepoints e.g. before, during and after (if possible) the crisis. To understand the marketplace of CSAM, filenames will be analysed qualitatively; and the sharing of paedophile manuals will be analysed quantitatively by analysing the frequency (1 January – 31 December 2024) of IP addresses sharing paedophile manuals by country. Although sexual violence occurs in all contexts, risks intensify and increase in humanitarian crises. During armed conflict, natural disasters and emergencies, women and children are especially vulnerable to sexual violence – including conflict-related sexual violence, intimate partner violence and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Therefore, the sexual exploitation of children during war, conflict or other humanitarian crises, is of major global concern. Research has investigated how children suffer from malnutrition, hunger, disease, trafficking, violence, forced conscription as child soldiers and sexual violence (Araujo et al., 2019) but there is no research to date which examines CSAM sharing during crises. As there is existing knowledge that children face heightened exploitation during crises, it would be remiss to not investigate how this extra level of vulnerability is being exploited through CSAM-sharing.  To better address sexual exploitation and abuse of children online during humanitarian crises; we must first understand it. And thus, this research is a nascent step in understanding the association (if any) between crises and the sharing of CSAM on P2P networks.  We are exploring the marketplace of CSAM in P2P filesharing networks by qualitatively analysing filenames e.g. gender, type of abuse, relationship to victim etc; and the volume of IP addresses sharing paedophile manuals. The sharing of paedophile manuals is seen as a risk factor for contact abuse. 12000 filenames will be provided from CRC. The filenames will be accompanied by annotated descriptions of the content for review for accuracy (the content descriptions are provided by CRC/law enforcement). For the filenames, we are interested in understanding the following elements: Number of victims.  Number of perpetrators.  Age of victims.  Age of perpetrators.  Nationality/ethnicity.  Relationship type (e.g. father/daughter).  Type of abuse.  For paedophile manual-sharing, we will examine the frequency (1 January – 31 December 2024) of IP addresses sharing paedophile manuals by country.