The Development of Technology and Commercial Child Sexual Abuse Online - A Literature Review

The objective of this thesis is to clarify how the development of technology affects commercial child sexual abuse online and what regulative problems arise with this. The goal is to increase general knowledge of the topic, which is not very much researched yet and in a continuous flux. The research was carried out as a narrative literature review. The method was selected, and the objective was to pull together and make a synthesis of knowledge situated in various fields: technology, law and criminology. The focus is in the phenomena of crime instead of issues regarding offenders or victims of crime. The point of view is the First World one. As a theoretical background I introduce criminologist Martin Killias’s theory of breaches and situational crime theories. All research is supposed to be objective, but it must be accepted that in content analysis it is very much likely that the researcher’s previous knowledge, interests and understanding of the subject affect how the material is filtered. This holds true in this research, too. In the results section I come up with five main themes; the issues of anonymity, problems regarding legal questions, troubles in categorization of crime and the problem of growing numbers of sexual abuse crimes and the blurring lines