![]() ![]() ‘We see a relatively large number of young people on the forums’ ‘To begin with, the dark web was a small group of technical people but over the years it has become much more accessible to a very big group.’ In her previous job with the police, she saw the use of forums skyrocket. The enormous number of users of child sexual abuse forums are ‘unfortunately no longer the exception’, says Van der Bruggen. ‘They are not always the ones who are given priority in police investigations but they can be just as much of a danger to children in the real world, which is why it is good to also look at this group.’ Accessibility and prevention These are people who post very few messages and only join the forum when it has been online for longer, but who do download illegal content. The information collected enabled Van der Bruggen to develop six offender profiles, ranging from ‘managers’ and ‘escalators’ to ‘lurkers’. For me, the idea that by doing my research I help prevent child sexual abuse outweighs the mental stress.’ If this work no longer affects you, you’ve become jaded and that’s not good. ‘You sometimes see things you’d rather not have seen or read. Van der Bruggen acknowledges that her work is emotionally taxing. ‘If this work no longer affects you, you’ve become jaded and that’s not good.’ But I also looked at the content of some of the messages they sent.’ ![]() ‘I looked at how active users were, at the number of messages sent and, for instance, at how long people used the forums. They could, for example, crawl the dark web for data (indexing a website with search engine software). ![]() Van der Bruggen worked with IT experts to gain the data sets. Together, these forums had over 600,000 active users, and the data sets that Van der Bruggen used contained around 760,000 posts. Van der Bruggen, who used to work for the police but is now a researcher for the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children, analysed the data from six child sexual abuse forums on the dark web. ![]()
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