2025/05/14 by Kang Sim, Julia Powles · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Child Abuse and Trauma #Child Development and Digital Technology
paper · doi:10.1093/9780198972877.003.0037
Abstract Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is illegal in most jurisdictions. Its illegality appears self-evident, conjuring visceral feelings of fear, disgust, and anger at humanity’s ability to commit, record, and view unspeakable acts of violence against its most vulnerable. The feeling is sustained by the apparent size of the problem, with the leading US clearinghouse receiving reports of nearly 36 million items of suspected CSAM in 2023. The sheer scale has nourished a global ecosystem of governments, tech companies, law enforcement, clearinghouses, and advocacy groups committed to detecting, collecting, reporting, and removing child sexual material (CSM), predominantly through computer vision–based systems. This article is about this CSM detection ecosystem, what it contains and leaves out, and what its formation reveals about the sociotechnical and political construction of online child sexual abuse. A focused examination of the CSM detection ecosystem reveals that CSAM is a legal and regulatory object through which projections, anxieties, and silences about child sexual abuse are encoded and enforced. The article begins with an overview of conventional and online child sexual abuse. Investigating CSAM as a legal object demonstrates how its definition and measurement under US federal law reifies protectionist understandings of children, bodies, and sexuality. These legal assumptions are enforced computationally through a CSM detection ecosystem that prioritizes tech solutionism and policing over help-seeking, harm prevention, and healthy sexual development. As a regulatory object, CSAM serves as a justification for implementing unreliable or ineffective technical measures such as client-side scanning that pose serious threats to the privacy and security of both children and adults.