Doctoral Student Profile

Hannah Merdian

Supervisors: Douglas Boer, Nick Wilson, Dr Jo Thakker, Dr Cate Curtis

Development of a risk assessment tool for online child sexual abuse image offenders
In the past decade, a new category of sexual offenders has emerged, referring to those who use the Internet in some manner to sexually offend. The limited research available has shown that there are some differences between Internet Sexual Offenders (ISOs) and conventional contact sexual offenders (CSOs) against children. Hence, the applicability of traditional personality and risk measures used within correctional services might be of restricted value for ISOs. Additionally, ISOs do not comprise a homogenous group but consist of several subgroups. For instance, some offenders may sell deviant material online, while others use the Internet to engage in cybersex with minors or to initiate offline meetings with potential victims. Of specific concern is the group of individuals who view, download, distribute, or produce online child sexual abuse images, commonly referred to as child pornography. However, not much is known about the features and potential risks of this particular subgroup.

My thesis proposes to develop a classification measure for online child pornography offenders (CPOs) only, based on their unique personality structures, cognitions, and offense characteristics. At this state, three different dimensions of online sexual abuse image offending on which CPOs may differ from each other can be assumed: (1) the function of child pornography in the offending behavior of a particular person, (2) the underlying motivation of the offending behavior, and (3) the social networking of the offender with other Internet offenders. Different combinations of these dimensions will relate to different levels of seriousness of the particular offender. Consequently, the proposed typology will provide a measure of recidivism risk of this new offender subgroup. The resulting measure will be tested in two steps: (1) a validation study of the COPINE scale, a tool to describe different levels of image content, (2) and a study to assess reliability and validity of the risk measure. The thesis is conducted in close collaboration with the Correctional Services in Hamilton, New Zealand, and the Censorship Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of New Zealand.