Fighting Child Sexual Abuse Material better together

Abstract

This study aims to make recommendations about how the Internet can be more thoroughly cleaned of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), focusing on the Dutch government policies. In the past years, several organizations, including the European Commission, called out the Netherlands for the role Dutch companies have in the hosting of CSAM. According to INHOPE, the CSAM hotline umbrella organization, the Netherlands is responsible for 20\% of the hosted CSAM worldwide and 79\% within the EU. For this study, a mixed-methods approach is chosen. A mixed-methods approach combines a qualitative and a quantitative method. The qualitative analysis is used to reveal relevant stakeholders, their positions, how they participate in the policymaking process, how they evaluate the government policies, and what they believe are the most significant improvements to the system. The quantitative results map information flows and processing times of the Dutch CSAM NTD mechanism. Combining the qualitative and quantitative research has revealed several pitfalls. Firstly, much CSAM remains unfound. Secondly, hotlines have a very important but also insecure position in the government policies. Further, are direct incentives for the sector more than moral duty are missing and the organizational degree of the sector is low. Also, the set norms and policies of the government and self-regulation are not accounting for the high diversity of the sector. There is a lack of financial resources. Finally, several stakeholders question the adequacy of law enforcement in regard to CSAM. Consequently, recommendations in three areas are made: (1) expanding and strengthen the current policies, (2) enhancing the collaboration between the stakeholders and their own position and (3) introducing new policy initiatives.