Recent News
Swipe, See, Suffer — Snapchat’s Sexualized Snapshots
When police knocked with a search warrant about inappropriate material on Snapchat, their first question was who sent it—our son had no answer. That moment captures a widening emergency: Snapchat’s algorithmic feeds routinely surface sexualized and exploitative content beyond friend networks, exposing adolescents and emerging adults to grooming, trauma, and cascading legal and disciplinary fallout.
Why Private Browsing Matters for Families Seeking CSAM‑Related Support
For many families navigating a CSAM accusation, even searching for help can feel frightening. Loved ones often worry that looking up resources, legal information, or emotional support might be misinterpreted, logged, or traced. This fear is understandable — people in this situation are already under immense stress, often feeling scrutinized, isolated, and unsure where it’s safe to turn.
That’s exactly why learning a few simple privacy practices can make a meaningful difference.
An Example of Inequity, Disproportionate Punishment, and Prosecutorial Discretion Weaponized Against the Easiest Targets
Wisconsin’s mandatory minimum sentencing structure, like similar laws in many states, is rigid where justice requires discernment. Sadly, even with mandatory minimums, there is no “one size fits all” proposition. Judges are elected to weigh evidence, culpability, risk, rehabilitation, and mitigation. Yet mandatory minimums can prevent them from imposing sentences that fit the individual facts of a case. That rigidity becomes more troubling when prosecutorial discretion is exercised unevenly: harshly against young defendants whose conduct reflects immaturity and low risk, but more flexibly for adult authority figures accused of hands-on conduct.
The Power of Perseverance - Advocating for an Imprisoned Loved One
We wrote letters to legislators, to the head of the Department of Corrections, and to the Governor, raising concerns about what we believed were serious Eighth Amendment violations. Repeatedly, it felt as though nothing was changing. It felt as though hope was running out.
Then something shifted in me. I began to realize that the Department of Corrections was not simply a labyrinth of uncaring people, but an overburdened system filled with human beings trying to manage impossible pressures. If I wanted someone to truly hear us, I could not rely only on legal arguments, even valid ones. I needed to reach the compassion of another person. I needed to speak not only as someone making a case, but also as someone asking to be seen.
New Research Exposes How Offenders Search for and Share CSAM Online
To address a critical gap in understanding how active offenders search for and share CSAM, Ofcom partnered with Protect Children on an unprecedented anonymous survey of individuals who used the dark web to find this material. The findings offer rare insight into offender behavior and technology use — but they represent only one part of the problem.
This research does not capture the vast number of individuals who encounter or access CSAM on the open web through Google searches, mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, or through apps such as Snapchat. The scale of harm on the “surface web” remains significantly under‑measured.
In today’s digital environment, it is crucial not to jump to conclusions about the many young people being placed on sex‑offender registries for possession of CSAM. A significant portion may have been exposed to illegal material long before they understood what they were seeing, or before they had the developmental maturity to process it. Some may have encountered CSAM through algorithmic pathways, peer‑to‑peer sharing, or accidental exposure — not through deliberate predatory behavior.
The Butner Study: Flawed, Biased, and Unreliable - It Misleads Lawmakers
The Butner Study is widely viewed by experts in forensic psychology and criminology as an unreliable source of evidence and an inappropriate foundation for policymaking. Its central assertion was that most individuals convicted of online‑only offenses have secretly committed hands‑on abuse , which rested on a treatment‑program sample of incarcerated federal offenders that cannot be generalized to the broader population.
Not a Dark‑Web Issue: CSAM Thrives on Social Media, and Prevention Is Urgent
Support Beyond Stigma continues to ask a fundamental question: why isn’t the Senate demanding that these companies implement filters to prevent illegal images from being uploaded in the first place? Why focus on reporting after the harm is done rather than on prevention?
Reconsidering Mandatory Minimums for Young Adults in CSAM Cases - A Policy Argument for Restoring Judicial Discretion
Across the country, policymakers are grappling with the challenge of applying laws written decades ago to a digital world that has transformed far faster than the legal system. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the prosecution of child sexual abuse material offenses involving young adults.
Cached, Convicted, Condemned: Why Sex Offender Registries and Mandatory Minimums Fail Youth
The doorbell rang before dawn on August 16, 2022. It sounded like a newborn’s cry, sharp and impossible to ignore. I checked my phone: 6:00 a.m., the sky was still dark. When I looked out our windows, officers stood at the front door in vests and fully armed. A Department of Justice forensic truck sat in our driveway; at least five squad cars surrounded our house like an impending storm.
That morning everything changed.
After Babel - The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence
Once again, After Babel has published an exceptional article discussing the extremely negative impacts social media has on our younger generations. In a recent article, it outlines the seven lines of evidence that will help decide thousands of future court cases.
Social Media Finally Held Accountable for Misleading Practices
Recent legal outcomes penalizing social media companies for misleading practices are taking hold. How long will it be until they are held accountable for allowing CSAM to be uploaded to their sites, and only reporting the harm afterwards? The recent decision against Meta may be a clue.
Spain Orders Criminal Investigation Into X, Meta, and TikTok Over Alleged AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material
"The Council of Ministers will invoke Article 8 of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecution Service to request that it investigate the crimes that X, Meta and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI," Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X on Tuesday.
The Families of People Who Commit Sex Crimes Need Care and Support
In a 2023 article authored by by Azadeh Nematy, a clinical psychologist and research assistant in the Department of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, there is a focus on the impacts on family members of those accused or convicted of a sexual offense.
Dangerous Shifts in the Rapidly Evolving World of Online Child Sexual Abuse
As new threats continue to emerge, the rapidly evolving world of online child sexual abuse materials demands more urgent and global action is needed.
Online Social Media, Child Sexual Abuse Material Spreads Faster than it Can Be Taken Down
Child sexual abuse material runs rampant on the internet thanks to popular social media platforms like Facebook, even despite attempts to crack down on its spread. We need scalable technology to address it.
BY Glen Pounder and Rasty Turek
An Investigation into Self-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material Networks on Social Media
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) Research Manager Renée DiResta and Chief Technologist David Thiel to discuss a 2023 report on a months-long investigation into the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online. The SIO research team identified a large network of accounts claiming to be minors, likely teenagers, who are producing, marketing and selling their own explicit content on social media.
Experiences of Non-offending Family Members
Learn more by reviewing Elaine Kavanagh’s thesis, “An Investigation of the Lived Experiences of Non-offending Family Members of Men Who Download Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).”
Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive -
“Grieving someone who’s still alive, that’s hard”: the experiences of non-offending partners of individuals who have sexually offended – an IPA study Katie Duncan, Andrea Wakeham, Belinda Winder, Nicholas Blagden & Rachel Armitage
Impact of CSAM on Non-offending Family Members
The impacts of CSAM offending on non-offending family members can be categorized as: 1) Disenfranchised Grief; 2) Ambiguous Loss; 3) Ontological Assault; 4) Contamination by Causal Responsibility; 5) Wall of Silence; 6) No-Win Situation, and 7) Burden of Responsibility.