interaction with others”.175 Some child sexual abuse material offenders may have low emotional stability, and/or exhibit relatively high levels of depression.176 The concept of Internet addiction disorder177—understood as an overuse of the Internet that is so excessive as to interfere with the ability to function and participate in daily life—may also be applicable in the case of some child sexual abuse material offenders.178 Offenders may use the concept of addiction to ease their sense of guilt about the offending behaviour. Research also characterizes a dichotomy of possible social motivations among child sexual abuse material offenders. One set of offenders consists of socially isolated persons with intimacy deficits who try to make up for emotional and sexual needs through online sexual activity. Another type of offenders consists of those who use the Internet to avoid real-world emotions and for whom interacting with child sexual abuse material serves as a soothing strategy when confronted with emotional distress.179 Other related typologies differentiate between “morally indiscriminant” offenders, whose child sexual abuse material-related offences constitute only part of their engagement in a broad variety of illegal conduct, and ”profiteers” who seek to generate money from the lucrative child sexual abuse material market. Although the latter may feel morally ambivalent about child sexual abuse material or even object to the exploitation per se, their interest in profit overrides their misgivings. Alternatively, commercial provi­ ders may have an interest in child sexual abuse material themselves, and may seek to add to their own contacts and collections of illicit material through commercial activities.180 Another important typology ranks offenders by the degree of seriousness of their conduct. One measure of seriousness is the level of in-person contact with victims involved, which ranks contact offences as more serious than non-contact offences. Another point of reference is the degree to which offenders protect access to their child sexual abuse material 175 Laulik, S., Allam, J., Sheridan, L., 2007. “An investigation into maladaptive personality functioning in Internet sex offenders”, Psychology, Crime & Law 13:531. 176 See ibid. 177 See e.g. Young, K. S., 1998. “Internet Addiction: The Emergence of a New Clinical Disorder”, CyberPsychology and Behaviour 1237-244; Grundner, T. M., 2000. The Skinner Box Effect: Sexual Addiction and Online Pornography; Greenfield, D., 2010. Clinical Treatment of Internet and Digitally-enabled Compulsive Behaviour. 178 Byun, S., et al., 2009. “Internet Addiction”, CyberPsychology & Behaviour 12: 203–204. 179 Quayle, E., Taylor, M., 2002. 180 Beech A., et al., 2008. P. 225. collections for the purposes of evading detection by law enforcement. In this respect, levels of protection of child sexual abuse material may serve as a measurement of perpetrator levels of involvement in child exploitation.181 Research also considers offenders’ motivation to commit cyberenticement or grooming offences. A recent European Union report classified offenders into three groups according to their motivations. The first category consists of “intimacy seekers”, who consider their relationships with children to be both romantic and consensual and tend to refrain from collecting large caches of child sexual abuse material, instead focusing their time and energy on pushing for in-person encounters with children. The second category in this typo­ logy consists of “adaptable offenders”, believing that their victims are precociously sexually mature, so that they are genuinely capable of consenting to the relationship. Thirdly, “hypersexual offenders” constitute the most serious category and possess vast collections of pornographic material.182 Cyberenticers are driven by their desire to engage in sexual acts with children or at least by a wish to fuel their fantasies about such unions. They often create sophisticated online personas for the express purpose of enticing children to produce self-created pornographic content through webcams. They may typically try to seduce multiple children at once, while wasting little time in escalating online conversations to a sexual tone. Cyberenticers also typically join groups of and communicate with other offenders for both social affirmation and tactical advice. The most frequent aggressive online sexual solicitations involve asking to meet a child in person (seven per cent of cases), calling a young person on the telephone (34 per cent of cases), coming to the home of the young person (18 percent of cases), giving a young person money, gifts or other items (12 per cent of cases), sending offline mail to a young person (nine per cent of cases), and buying travel tickets for a young person (three per cent of cases).183 People who transmit harmful content to children have varied motivations. Many simply gain satisfaction from the idea of causing harm to children. For instance, children using peerto-peer file-sharing programs may open pornographic content because the files have been mislabeled. Along similar Ibid. Pp. 224-225. Webster, S., et al., 2012. European Online Grooming Project. Final Report. Pp. 13-14. 183 Wolak, J., et al., 2006. Online Victimization of Youth Five Years Later. Available at http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/ publications/NC167.pdf. 181 182 28 STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ON THE ABUSE AND EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN