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What is online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA)?

OCSEA refers to the usage of the internet or communication technologies to facilitate the sexual abuse of children and adolescents. Examples of child sexual exploitation and abuse can exist in many forms - grooming, sexual extortion, sexting, live-streaming, perceived first-person (often called "self-generated"), and child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). Although there is no single legal definition for online CSAM, this term - which is still legally known as child pornography in the U.S. - generally refers to sexually explicit imagery involving a child.

It is a misconception that in order for an OCSEA incident to occur on a website or app, children must be users of the app. This is not true. For example, many OCSEA harms occur between adults - trading CSAM amongst themselves, hosting chat forms that sexualize children, using CSAM for profile photos, grooming of other adults with the goal of exploiting their children. In addition, children can commonly evade age assurance tools and tactics and obtain access to online spaces meant only for adults.

Examples of OCSEA Harm Types

Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM)

CSAM includes still images, videos, and illustrated, computer-generated or other forms of realistic depictions, as well as live streaming broadcasts of a child in a sexually explicit context, or engaging in sexually explicit acts.

Online Grooming

Grooming broadly describes the tactics abusers use to build trust and rapport with a child in order to gain access to that child for the purpose of sexual activity or exploitation. This type of victimization takes place across every platform; social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, etc., and may include instances when a child is being groomed to take sexually explicit images and/or ultimately meet face-to-face with someone for sexual purposes, or to engage in a sexual conversation online or, in some instances, to sell/trade the child’s sexual images.

Minor Sexualization

Is the creation or sharing of content (including photos, videos, real-world art, digital content, and verbal depictions) that sexualizes real or non-real children.

Sextortion

Is a form of child sexual exploitation where children are threatened or blackmailed, most often with the possibility of sharing with the public a nude or sexual images of them, by a person who demands additional sexual content, sexual activity or money from the child. Livestreaming: Livestreaming allows abusers to create child sexual abuse content in real-time. Livestreaming of child sexual abuse may include adult offenders who direct the child abuse whilst the acts are streamed live to an audience, or coerce children into using livestreaming platforms to produce child sexual abuse material.

Trafficking

Child sex trafficking is a form of child abuse that occurs when a child under 18 is advertised, solicited or exploited through a commercial sex act. A commercial sex act is any sex act where something of value – such as money, food, drugs or a place to stay – is given to or received by any person for sexual activity.

Establish operations in order to identify and respond to an OCSEA incident

Create external standards that prohibit OCSEA

An important practice for fighting OCSEA is to incorporate public-facing language into a company’s external standards, for example their Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policies and / or Community Guidelines, that prohibits this behavior.

Create child safety content policy that outline how to identify and take action on OCSEA

To facilitate fighting online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA), companies can create a Child Safety Content Policy to gather definitions and to document enforcement guidelines. This helps ensure alignment across teams and consistency, and will be used by reviewers in content moderation.

Method for surfacing cases

User reporting

Users of a Company’s product(s) should be able to report harmful content and/or behavior to the Company for them to review and potentially take down the content or take action on the user. Add child safety reporting options to any surface / page and consider having a Help Center / Support article that provides a means for users to report potential child abuse.

Detection

Current technology solutions, open source or not, enable companies to detect OCSEA on their platform, including CSAM distribution, online grooming etc. The most common of those solutions include hash-matching solutions (such as PhotoDNA), image/video classifiers, text classifiers, keywords ingesting and URL blocking. Note that implementing detection capabilities should include assessing needs for human review of the detected content to plan for resources, such as a moderator team.

Register with The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)

NCMEC is the United States’ nonprofit clearinghouse and comprehensive reporting center for all issues related to the prevention of and recovery from child victimization. NCMEC operates the CyberTipline for leads and tips regarding OCSEA. U.S. based and international Electronic Service Providers (ESPs) can contact NCMEC to register an account with the CyberTipline.

To create an account with the CyberTipline and register as an ESP, a company may contact NCMEC to register an account with the CyberTipline at [email protected] or by accessing https://esp.ncmec.org/registra.... NCMEC will provide a form requesting information. Once the form is filled and submitted to NCMEC, they will then provide the login credentials for the company to begin submitting reports.

Take Action when an OCSEA incident occurs

Report the case to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)

NCMEC operates the CyberTipline, the national clearinghouse for leads and tips regarding child sexual exploitation. Once a company is registered with the CyberTipline (see previous section on how to register), they can report OCSEA incidents to NCMEC using their CyberTipline Reporting API or the CyberTipline Manual Reporting Form.

Enforcement on your platform

Enforcement is the action a company takes when an account or content violates a company’s policies. There are various options for enforcement which can depend on a company’s business and capabilities. Some examples of enforcement include content removal, full termination of an account, device bans, etc.

Prepare for Law Enforcement to respond with legal process

An OCSEA report sent to NCMEC, after their prioritization and review, may be investigated by Law Enforcement. The Law Enforcement agency may follow up with the Company to request additional data. The additional information provided to Law Enforcement may enable them to locate and safeguard a minor victim, it may enable them to collect the necessary evidence against the bad actor, etc.

How to Raise Awareness

Safety by design

Safety by Design [hyperlink to knowledge hub resource] is a proactive approach that focuses on preventing harm by incorporating safety into the design and development of products, services, and infrastructure.

By implementing Safety by Design techniques and processes, a company can prevent harm before it occurs, rather than mitigate harm after.

Transparency reports

Transparency reporting refers to reports that explain a company’s approach to addressing OCSEA, which should highlight the company’s policies, explain its processes, and document the outcomes of its efforts.

Transparency is an essential component of industry efforts to combat online CSEA. It drives accountability and plays a critical role in building trust with users, regulators, and the general public.

Please refer to the Tech Coalition’s TRUST Framework for more details on how to develop a Transparency Report.

Safety Education

Safety Education is a broad term to mean any education to users within your website or app. It can be help center articles about how to spot signs of OCSEA, or in-product tips to children when they are in a high risk situation (for example, someone has asked them to send a photo) or act as deterrence for potential offenders (for example, reinforcing that CSAM is illegal and promoting helplines to users who search it).

Safety education can have real world impact on preventing OCSEA and providing resources and support to those in need. It also relieves the workload to your operations team and its downstream stakeholders such as NCMEC and Law Enforcement.

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Disclaimer – All companies are different: We understand all companies are different and may take different approaches. These recommendations are intended to help facilitate internal, cross functional conversations and do not intend to define a standard of care – you may wish to add or subtract from them as needed.

This was not developed to provide legal guidance or regulatory compliance: We did not overlay

or compare this information with current or drafted legislation.

For the purpose of this content, child or minor refers to someone who is under 18 years of age.