The forgotten victims of the internet
Current debates about online harms have focused on a range of topics including misinformation, mental health impacts, privacy breaches and online misogyny. Yet one of the most profound and least acknowledged injustices is the ongoing abuse of survivors of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). These are individuals whose sexual abuse as children was recorded and distributed online – material that continues to circulate, sometimes decades later.
In our recent article in the Journal of Gender-Based Violence, we argue that CSAM survivors have been politically abandoned under the internet’s dominant ideology of cyber-libertarianism. While producing, sharing or possessing CSAM is illegal in almost every country, in practice the global internet infrastructure has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘state of exception’ – a zone where law is suspended and offenders act with impunity.
Survivors in a ‘state of exception’
Drawing on Agamben’s concept of homo sacer – the person stripped of political protection and left exposed to violence – we show how CSAM survivors are consigned to ‘bare life’ online. They are denied the rights to safety, privacy and justice that should be guaranteed to every citizen.
Our research analysed data from the Jane Doe Project, an initiative of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which aims to promote the rights of CSAM victims whose material is extensively traded online. We focused on three women, known pseudonymously as Jane Doe 1, 2 and 3, whose sexual abuse was recorded as children and who remain among the most widely circulated CSAM victims globally.
Between 2018 and 2023, Project Arachnid (a webcrawler designed to detect and pressure online services to delete CSAM through the issuance of removal notices) sighted material from the Jane Does over 59,000 times across the internet. Much of this was hosted on commercial file-sharing platforms on the ‘clear web’ (the publicly available internet), but offenders also promoted and exchanged this material on encrypted child sexual abuse forums hosted on the Tor network (the so-called ‘dark web’).
Offender subcultures and the glorification of abuse
We also examined thousands of conversations among offenders on Tor forums, and found that a subculture of paedophile libertinism thrives within online ‘states of exception’. In these spaces, abuse is reframed as freedom, children are often imagined as consenting participants, and those who produce CSAM are hailed as ‘heroes’. The Jane Does were fetishised as ‘queens’ of child sexual abuse, with members of these forums treating their abuse images and videos as cultural icons. Some offenders actively sought out the survivors’ adult identities, circulating their names, photos and social media profiles. Our analysis emphasises that CSAM is not only a record of abuse in the past: it is the engine of present-day stalking and harassment on a monumental scale.
The politics of cyber-libertarianism
Why has so little been done to stop this?
Part of the answer lies in the dominance of cyber-libertarian ideology in internet governance. Since the 1990s, tech companies have been granted sweeping immunity from prosecution for hosting illegal content, underpinned by claims that regulation threatens ‘digital rights’ and innovation. Proposals for proactive CSAM detection and removal, particularly in encrypted environments, are regularly denounced as authoritarian ‘mass surveillance’.
The effect is to pit the rights of CSAM survivors to safety and dignity against the supposed rights of all internet users to unregulated freedom. Survivors like the Jane Does are silenced and marginalised in these debates, while companies and civil society organisations champion abstract notions of privacy and liberty that, in practice, entrench impunity for abusers.
A call for change
Our research highlights the profound mismatch between the scale of the harm and the policy response. In 2024 alone, there were 63 million reports of suspected CSAM to US authorities – an unprecedented level of abuse that existing systems cannot contain. Survivors face not only the trauma of their abuse but relentless violation as recordings of that abuse are endlessly circulated, and weaponised against them as adults.
This is not inevitable. The persistence of CSAM online reflects political and commercial choices:
- Commercial hosting services continue to profit while failing to scan for and remove illegal content;
- Governments grant the technology sector exemptions from responsibilities that would be unthinkable in other industries;
- Civil society groups invoke the language of freedom and privacy to oppose even minimal protections for children.
Reform is both possible and urgent. Survivors themselves, through groups such as the Phoenix 11, have called for:
- Proactive detection and removal of CSAM, not just reliance on user reporting;
- Specialised support services, including safety planning, financial compensation and mental health care;
- Stronger disruption of offenders’ forums on Tor that normalise and promote sexual violence against children.
Restoring citizenship to survivors
Placing survivors at the centre of these debates obliges us to recognise that their suffering is not accidental but built into the architecture of the internet as it currently exists. To repatriate survivors from the ‘state of exception’ requires more than piecemeal reforms; it demands a rethinking of how we balance rights and responsibilities online.
If the internet is to serve as a democratic public sphere, it cannot continue to operate on the systematic abandonment of its most vulnerable victims. Protecting survivors of child sexual abuse material is not a secondary concern. It is a test of whether our political, legal and technological systems are willing to extend justice to those who need it most.
Michael Salter is the Director of the Childlight East Asia and Pacific Hub at the University of New South Wales.
Lloyd Richardson is Director of Technology at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P).
Jacques Marcoux is Director of Research & Analytics at C3P.
Katelin Neufeld is a Beahvioural Research Scientist at C3P.
Kelly Barker is a Research Analyst at C3P.
The child sexual abuse material survivor as homo sacer: bare life under cyber-libertarianism by Michael Salter, Lloyd Richardson, Jacques Marcoux, Katelin H.S. Neufeld and Kelly Barker is available to read in the Journal of Gender-Based Violence on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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