Unveiling local patterns of child pornography consumption in France using Tor

Child pornography—better known as child sexual abuse material (CSAM)—represents a severe form of exploitation and victimization of children, leaving the victims with emotional and physical trauma. In this study, we aim to analyze local patterns of CSAM consumption across 1341 French communes in 20 metropolitan regions of France between March 16 to May 31, 2019 using fine-grained mobile traffic data of Tor network-related web services. We estimate that approx. 0.08% of Tor mobile download traffic observed in France is linked to the consumption of CSAM by correlating it with local-level temporal porn consumption patterns. This compares to 0.19% of what we conservatively estimate to be the share of CSAM content in global Tor traffic. In line with existing literature on the link between sexual child abuse and the consumption of image-based content thereof, we observe a positive and statistically significant effect of our CSAM consumption estimates on the reported number of victims of sexual violence and vice versa, which validates our findings, after controlling for a set of geographically disaggregated features including socio-demographic characteristics, voting behavior, nearby points of interest and Google Trends queries. While this is a first, exploratory attempt to look at CSAM from a spatial epidemiological angle, we believe this research provides public health officials with valuable information to prioritize target areas for public awareness campaigns as another step to fulfill the global community’s pledge to target 16.2 of the sustainable development goals: “end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children".