Child sexual abuse images and youth produced images: The varieties of Image-based Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Children

Background and objective: This paper presents a categorization of sexual image crimes and abuse that occur against children, and it compares their frequency, dynamics, and emotional impact. Participants: A national sample of 2639 respondents aged 18-to-28 disclosed 369 childhood epi-sodes involving a variety of image abuse.Methods: Online self-administered questionnaire.Results: The analysis classified the cases into five incident types: 1) adult made images (child sexual abuse images), 2) images non-consensually made by other youth, 3) voluntarily provided self-made images that were non-consensually shared by other youth, 4) voluntarily provided self-made images non-consensually shared by adults, and 5) voluntarily provided self-made images to adults that entailed an illegal age difference or were part of a commercial transaction. We propose to refer to this aggregation of types as Image Based Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Children (IBSEAC). Only 12 % of the image episodes qualified as adult produced, child sexual abuse im-ages. Such adult produced image experiences were also not higher in negative emotional impact than the youth produced images. Only 10 % of the episodes involved images of children under age 13.Conclusion: The study highlights the predominance of youth made sexual images among the image exploitation and abuse affecting youth according to self-report. It also highlights the difference between what victim surveys reveal about the problem and what is inferred from police record studies.