It is evident that child sexual abuse imagery and its growing availability on the internet is a social epidemic substantially impacting the lives of children/survivors and all those trying to protect them. We must reverse this dynamic and start approaching the removal of child sexual abuse images and harmful/abusive images3 of children from a protection and rights framework.
After 17 years of working in the space of online child sexual abuse and exploitation, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (Canadian Centre) believes a new approach to the removal of child sexual abuse images and harmful/abusive images of children is urgently needed. In our organization, a major turning point came when we established Project Arachnid — a web platform designed to detect online child sexual abuse images proactively rather than waiting for the public to report them. The evidence made available by Project Arachnid prompted us to write this framework.
Project Arachnid brought to light the prevalence of images made prior to, and following, sexual abuse incidents; images that may not depict abuse or nudity, but are part of the sequence of the abuse images. Project Arachnid has also found images of physical child abuse and torture that are not overtly sexualized. As far as the Canadian Centre is aware, both categories of images do not fall under criminal definitions of child sexual abuse images in jurisdictions worldwide, and therefore, technology companies are not obliged to remove them. However, they are depictions of abuse and profoundly harmful to the children captured in those images.
As such, we are proposing a set of principles for action that a) prioritizes the best interests and protection of children, b) clarifies key roles and responsibilities, and c) ensures a coordinated, standardized, and effective response across jurisdictions.
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