Sexual-Orientated Online Chat Conversations—Characteristics and Testing Pathways of Online Perpetrators
Manon Kleijn, Stefan Bogaerts · Information technology and law series/Information technology & law series · 2019
Children all over the world are constantly at risk of becoming a victim of webcam child sex tourism (hereafter WCST). Law enforcement agencies are struggling with tackling the problem. Little is known about the behaviour of online perpetrators who persuade minors to engage in webcam sex. In order to gain more information about the behaviour of this group, the ten-year-old Philippine avatar Sweetie was deployed as a tool. In this first preliminary study 200 chat conversations were analysed. Based on the first findings, almost all online perpetrators were male with an average reported age of 29 years old living in Europe, North America and Asia. Two types of perpetrators were found: the Clint-type, who had clear intentions to talk about sex related topics or about starting a webcam conversation to persuade the minor to engage in (online) sexual activities; and the Small talk type, who used small talk to persuade the minor to engage in (online) sexual activities. This study shows that online perpetrators can be classified into perpetrators who display avoiding and approaching behaviour, which is comparable to the offline offending pathways of Ward and Hudson.