Hidden Worlds: How Child Sexual Abuse Offenders Portray Themselves in Clear-Web Paedophile Community Interactions and...

The protection of children from sexual abuse is of paramount importance to society, and the threat of this abuse has only grown in recent years. Those who pose this threat, child sex offenders, have been found to congregate in online communities where they can trade abusive material and interact with each other. Despite concerns raised in research about the harmful influence of these communities on their members, they remain greatly understudied. The present article aims to bring to light a phenomenon taking place in these communities: how the offenders present their identities, behaviors, and motivations. Two complementary datasets were approached from a computer-mediated discourse and thematic analysis perspective, which were sourced from (1) clear-web offender-to-offender interactions in private social media chats, and (2) offenders responding to a survey on the dark-web. The results show that there was diversity in how offenders portrayed themselves to others, with predominantly positive self-presentations in the private chats and many negative self-presentations in the survey responses. Offenders rationalized and defended their criminal behaviors, dehumanizing victims and transferring blame away from themselves. They also disclosed primarily sexual motivations for offending, but a range of motivations were cited. Identity construction differed substantially between the two datasets, potentially indicating that offenders tailor how they present their pedophilia to their audience.