Research team: Michael C. Seto, Royal Ottawa Health Care Group; Cierra Buckman, Johns Hopkins University; R. Gregg Dwyer, Medical University of South Carolina; Ethel Quayle, University of Edinburgh.

The primary objective in this project was to develop knowledge to assist law enforcement in identifying victims of child sexual abuse material and intervening to prevent child sexual exploitation and abuse.

In this study, data from two different datasets was analyzed: (1) a historical dataset that encompassed all actively traded cases involving identified victims from July 1, 2002, to June 30, 2014 (518 cases involving 933 victims); (2) a modern dataset encompassing all cases involving identified victims from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2014 (1,965 cases involving one offender and one victim, and 633 cases involving multiple offenders and/or victims; only a small minority of these cases were actively traded). The historical set allowed to examine trends over time, whereas the modern dataset had more information due to a more comprehensive law enforcement submission form implemented in 2011.