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There is increasing public and professional concern about internet-facilitated sexual offending, reflected in a greater number of prosecutions and clinical referrals for these crimes (Middleton, Mandeville-Norden, & Hayes, 2009; Motivans & Kyckelhan, 2007; United States Department of Justice, 2010). Internet sexual offending comprises a range of crimes, including possession or distribution of child pornography; production of child pornography; sexual solicitations [1] (online interactions with minors for sexual purposes, including plans to meet offline); and conspiracy crimes, for example, collaborating with others to distribute or produce child pornography or to solicit minors.
The increase in internet sexual offending has been paralleled by a decrease in the number of reported child sexual abuse cases, and violent crime more broadly (Mishra & Lalumière, 2009; Finkelhor & Jones, 2006). This indicates that internet sexual offending is a new phenomenon that may not be influenced by the same contextual factors as other kinds of sexual or violent crime. An important research question is the extent to which internet sex offenders represent a new type of sex offender, or whether they reflect the transformation of conventional sexual offending through the adoption of new technologies (Seto & Hanson, 2011).
This webinar focuses on what is known about internet-facilitated sexual offending, including recent research about the motivations and other psychological characteristics of internet offenders, differences between child pornography and solicitation offenders, history of contact offending, risk of recidivism, and an overview of intervention models.
[1] Solicitation offenders have also been called “travelers” in previous
research on this population, while child pornography offenders are
called “traders”. Briggs, Simon, and Simonsen (2011), discussed in more
detail later, have distinguished between solicitation offenders who
appear to be fantasy-driven, restricting their sexual interactions to
online behavior such as sexually explicit chat, exhibitionism via
webcam, and/or transmission of pornography, and those who appear to be
contact-driven, where the online interactions are directed at arranging
face-to-face meetings where sexual activities might take place.