My suspicion is that we are seeing a “one time” increase due to better ability to create and share child abuse content. That is, my guess is the incident rate of child abuse is not much changing, but the visibility of it is because it’s become easier to produce and share content featuring the actions that were already happening privately. I could imagine some small (let’s say 10%) marginal increase in abuse incentivized by the ability to share, but on the whole I expect the majority of child abuser are continuing to abuse at the same rate.
Most of this argument rests on a prior I have that unexpected large increases like this are usually not signs of change in the thing we care about, but instead changes in secondary things that make the primary thing more visible. I’m sure I could be convinced this was evidence of an increase in child abuse proportionate with the reported numbers, but I think it far more likely lacking such evidence that it’s mostly explained by increased ease producing and sharing content only.
I don’t think this explains the 18x increase between 2014 and 2018. Communication technology didn’t change much in that timeframe, and it’d be surprising if child porn communities substantially lagged behind the mainstream in terms of their tech (there are heavy incentives for them to stay up-to-date).
>Communication technology didn’t change much in that timeframe
I find it plausible that de facto availability of secure communication channels had a lowered enough technical bar that thresholds were passed in that time frame.
My suspicion is that we are seeing a “one time” increase due to better ability to create and share child abuse content. That is, my guess is the incident rate of child abuse is not much changing, but the visibility of it is because it’s become easier to produce and share content featuring the actions that were already happening privately. I could imagine some small (let’s say 10%) marginal increase in abuse incentivized by the ability to share, but on the whole I expect the majority of child abuser are continuing to abuse at the same rate.
Most of this argument rests on a prior I have that unexpected large increases like this are usually not signs of change in the thing we care about, but instead changes in secondary things that make the primary thing more visible. I’m sure I could be convinced this was evidence of an increase in child abuse proportionate with the reported numbers, but I think it far more likely lacking such evidence that it’s mostly explained by increased ease producing and sharing content only.
I don’t think this explains the 18x increase between 2014 and 2018. Communication technology didn’t change much in that timeframe, and it’d be surprising if child porn communities substantially lagged behind the mainstream in terms of their tech (there are heavy incentives for them to stay up-to-date).
>Communication technology didn’t change much in that timeframe
I find it plausible that de facto availability of secure communication channels had a lowered enough technical bar that thresholds were passed in that time frame.
Yeah, maybe. Messenger’s user base doubled over that timeframe, though was already at 600 million users in early 2015.
Facebook did roll out opt-in end-to-end encryption for Messenger in late 2016, which is a possible inflection for this.