Online sexual harassment of minors: similarities and differences in recidivism and criminal history compared to other child sexual offenders
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35622/Keywords:
child sexual abuse, harassment, crime, pornography, information technologyAbstract
Requests of a sexual nature directed at minors through the internet, a phenomenon identified as online sexual harassment of minors, have shown in recent years a steadily increasing trend in the criminal statistics recorded in Spain. The main objective of the present study is to describe and compare the criminal history and recidivism of individuals arrested for online sexual harassment of minors, child sexual abuse, and child pornography, based on police records, in order to identify differential patterns of criminal behavior. To this end, information on criminal history and recidivism was extracted from three different samples of individuals arrested for offenses of online sexual harassment of minors, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. This information, initially obtained from police reports, was expanded with data from police arrest databases and subsequently subjected to statistical analysis. The methodology follows a quantitative approach with a non-experimental, exploratory, descriptive, and comparative design. The results show that both the rate of recidivism and the prevalence of previous criminal history are higher in offenses related to online sexual harassment of minors than in the other two samples. The criminal history involving other sexual offenses is also recurrently higher. From these findings, it can be inferred that the profile of the online sexual harasser of minors is much more similar to that of child sexual abuse offenders than to that of child pornography offenders. Consequently, both police response and reintegration strategies should be adapted to such characteristics.
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