Sexual Assault Trials Handbook — Online exploitation

T Krone and RG Smith, “Trajectories in online child sexual exploitation offending”, in Australian Institute of Criminology, Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice, No 524, 2017.

This paper reports on an exploratory study aimed to improve understanding of the risks posed by those investigated by the Australian Federal Police for online-only offences. The study examined data relating to a sample of offenders convicted of online child sexual exploitation offences under Australian Commonwealth law, to determine how online forms of child sexual exploitation and offline child sexual exploitation, or contact offending, are related. The criminal trajectories of offenders were examined to determine whether there were any features that distinguished those with more extensive criminal convictions from those with fewer. The paper also considers prior research into child sexual exploitation, and the extent of the problem.