Grooming, Child Abuse, & Child Sexual Exploitation

Open Access: No.

Abstract

This study compared two groups of child pornography offenders participating in a voluntary treatment program: men whose known sexual offense history at the time of judicial sentencing involved the possession, receipt, or distribution of child abuse images, but did not include any “hands-on” sexual abuse; and men convicted of similar offenses who had documented histories of hands-on sexual offending against at least one child victim. The goal was to determine whether the former group of offenders were “merely” collectors of child pornography at little risk for engaging in hands-on sexual offenses, or if they were contact sex offenders whose criminal sexual behavior involving children, with the exception of Internet crimes, went undetected. Our findings show that the Internet offenders in our sample were significantly more likely than not to have sexually abused a child via a hands-on act. They also indicate that the offenders who abused children were likely to have offended against multiple victims, and that the incidence of “crossover” by gender and age is high.

Relevance

This study examined incarcerated sex offenders – men imprisoned for actual child sexual abuse (hands-on) as those convicted for possessing child sexual abuse images. The results showed that, despite initial claims by the image offenders to the contrary, a “significant number” of the child porn offenders had also committed actual (hands-on abuse) that went unreported. That is to say, the use of child images was for a significant number of image offenders “not limited to fantasy.” When the opportunity arose, either by chance or planned, they also molested and raped children.

Citation

Bourke, M. L., & Hernandez, A. E. (2009). The ‘Butner Study’ redux: A report of the incidence of hands-on child victimization by child pornography offenders. Journal of Family Violence, 24(3), 183–191. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-008-9219-y