In 2021, almost 85 million images and videos of sexually abused children will be distributed online – and the trend is rising. A research group from Stockholm wants to protect children and offers people who view such content behavioral therapy directly on the dark web – with success.
A research team from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has succeeded in winning over pedophile-oriented people to anonymous behavioral therapy via the dark web, thereby reducing their consumption of child pornography. “Our goal is to prevent the sexual abuse of children,” says study leader Christopher Rahm in a statement from the Karolinska Institute. “Unfortunately, we are seeing an increasing proliferation of such materials online and that current strategies to curb this trend are inadequate. Therefore, we wanted to test whether an anonymous Internet-based therapy program, which we are calling ‘Prevent It’, could persuade people to stop using material about the sexual abuse of children”, Rahm is further quoted as saying.
The idea for the current study came from people who had participated in a previous study on the pharmacological treatment of pedophilia. In interviews, some of them expressed a wish to have received help earlier in life. One of these study participants even helped the research team prepare for the current study.
First, over a period of two and a half years, the research team placed various advertisements and links in Darknet chats, thus offering anonymous behavioral therapy. From the more than 5,000 people who then came forward, the experts selected 160 male people who consumed images and videos of sexually abused children online for the study and then randomly divided them into two groups.
80 people in the first group participated in the Prevent-It program. The other 80 people received eight weeks of psychological counseling that had previously been deemed ineffective therapy. The second group served as the control group for the researchers. Both groups received their therapies over the Internet for eight weeks. They were in contact with their therapists through a website or email.
The Prevent-It program, which consists of eight different modules and places particular emphasis on actively changing behavior and thinking patterns and training participants on children’s inability to give consent, has had an effect. Even if the therapy could not ensure that all participants refrain from consuming child pornographic content on the dark web, the intervention still had measurable effects. The eight-week program resulted in participants spending less time consuming this content overall.
What was striking, however, was that Prevent-It had a relatively small effect compared to the control group. The reason: Contrary to expectations, the placebo treatment also had an effect on the participants. After eight or twelve weeks, around half of the participants in both groups stated that they had not consumed any child pornographic content in the past week. However, the experts only saw these effects in the participants who had endured the therapy to the end. This was 37 out of 80 in the Prevent-It group and 50 out of 80 in the placebo group.
“Ideally, we would like to see the behavior stop completely, but the results offer hope that there is a viable, effective, and safe way to treat these individuals. We believe it could be a valuable adjunct to other interventions that are being used.” aim to prevent the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children,” said Johanna Lätth, who was involved in the study, according to the institute.
Child pornography material is often shared on the dark web. On the one hand, the encrypted nature of the Darknet makes it difficult for the police to identify perpetrators and hold them accountable. On the other hand, users of such forums themselves state that they feel desperate and want to stop their behavior. However, out of shame and fear of prosecution, they are not willing to contact the responsible authorities or bodies.
The range of therapies is low-threshold, relatively cheap, and it can reach many people around the world, including in rural areas, said Peer Briken, Director of the Institute for Sex Research and Forensic Psychiatry at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, the Science Media Center in London. He also announced that he would offer an adapted form of “Prevent It2” in Portugal, Sweden and Germany. The results of the study were published in the journal “Internet Intervention”.
