The medical aspects of victim vulnerabilities in child sexual exploitation

Abstract

The sexual abuse of children and sexual exploitation have been crimes for centuries. However, the dawn of the publicly available digital age has brought with it a dark cloud of extraordinary impact on infants, toddlers, children, and youth. Child sexual abusive images, a preferred description to the legal term “child pornography,” now is being recognized as having a much greater impact than previously presumed. The “abusive image” terminology is more accurate for two reasons. The first is that “pornography” infers voluntary modeling, and for the general public the term can minimize the extraordinary long-term impact of existing memorialization of abuse. Abusive images of children are digital crime scenes, and they represent many motives on the part of the producer. The second reason “child pornography” is an inaccurate term is because it infers consent, and minors are unable to provide consent to sexual victimization. The term “abusive” is the most appropriate description of these images because they continue to cause harm to the victim long after the actual production takes place (Cooper, Johnson, & Wright, 2015). This constitutes a recognized aspect of ongoing victim impact-that the inherent pain caused by the existence of the images is compounded when the images are downloaded, traded and/or possessed by others.