To know or not to know: Should crimes regarding photographs of their child sexual abuse be disclosed to now-adult, unknowing victims?
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758018814601 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
To know or not to know:
Should crimes regarding
photographs of their child
sexual abuse be disclosed
to now-adult, unknowing
victims?
Suzanne Ost and Alisdair A Gillespie
Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Abstract
This paper considers the unexplored question of whether unaware crime victims have rights or
interests in knowing and not knowing information pertaining to the crime(s) committed against
them. Our specific focus is on whether crimes regarding abusive images should be disclosed to the
now-adult victims of child sexual abuse who feature in them. Because these issues have not
been addressed in the victimology or criminological literature, we utilise literature in another
discipline – healthcare ethics and law – to inform our analysis. Through engaging with the debate on
the right to know and not to know information concerning one’s genetic status, we develop a
conceptualisation of the issues regarding unknowing abusive image victims. A rights-based con-
ceptualisation proves to be largely inappropriate; we contend that, instead, it would be more
productive to look to unknowing abusive image victims’ interests. We argue that the interests at
stake are grounded in autonomy and/or spatial privacy, and that to find a way to resolve the
disclosure dilemma, these interests must be considered alongside consequentialist concerns;
disclosing information regarding abusive images could empower now-adult victims but could well
cause them (further) harm. Finally, we consider the implications of our analysis for victimology.
Keywords
Abusive images, child sexual abuse victims, right to know, right not to know, unknowing crime
victims, empowerment, harm
Corresponding author:
Suzanne Ost, Law School, Bowland North, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, United Kingdom.
Email: s.ost@lancaster.ac.uk
International Review of Victimology
2019, Vol. 25(2) 223–247
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0269758018814601
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Introduction
Imagine the following scenario. During their investigation of crimes related to abusive images, law
enforcement agents (LEAs) successfully identify the very young victim – a toddler – who features
in the images. The images are historic, and the victim is now an adult. There is no evidence to
suggest the victim is aware of the images and, because of their very young age when the crimes
were committed, they may remain unaware of the actual abuse. Now imagine that victim is you.
Would you want to be informed of the crimes and the existence of the images?
The identification of children who feature in abusive images (AI) has always posed real
challenges (Holland, 2005; Carr and Hilton, 2011).
1
Victim identification has been coordinated
nationally, but only by one underfunded unit within the Child Exploitation and Online Protection
Centre in the United Kingdom (UK) (Gillespie, 2011: 332–333) and, in 2014, the National Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children claimed that police were ‘overwhelmed’ by the amount of
AI collected from seized computers (Conway, 2014). Although victim identification remains far
from straightforward, 2014 saw the launch of the national Child Abuse Images Database (CAID), a
system designed to speed up the process of cataloguing and analysing images (Home Office,
2018). All police forces now have access to CAID and there are clear indications that it has
increased the number of victims being identified and speeded up the identification process (Home
Office, 2018). The rolling out of CAID and greater success in terms of victim identification are
significant positive developments but, at the same time, they have increased the likelihood of the
dilemma that is the concern of this paper. For where victims are successfully identified and located,
this raises difficult ethical issues pertaining to whether to disclose the existence of AI to them.
We note at the outset that this paper is not focused on cases where the identified victims are still
children. For such victims, there are significant and urgent matters that must be addressed follow-
ing their identification and location, such as ascertaining whether they are now in a safe environ-
ment and whether they have received counselling support, matters beyond the scope of this paper
(Palmer, 2005).
2
Rather, our focus is on images depicting historic child sexual abuse where the
identified victim is now an adult. Where the images depict historic crimes, four different scenarios
can be envisaged. First, LEAs may identify a victim who is aware that her abuse was recorded in
photographs and that these photographs were disseminated (V1).
3
Secondly, they might identify a
victim who is aware of the AI, but not that they were distributed to others (V2). In the third possible
scenario, they may identify a victim who is aware of her sexual abuse but not of the AI because
they were taken covertly (V3). Finally, LEAs could be faced with the scenario with which we
began this paper: they could identify a victim who was abused at a very young age and is thus
unaware both of the sexual abuse and the AI (V4), as might occur, for example, when unaware
toddlers or pre-school victims become adults (Anon, 2010; Morris, 2010). To complicate matters
further, it is highly likely that, when they identify a victim featured in a photograph, LEAs will not
know which of these scenarios they face unless they have identified a victim already known to
them and are aware of the degree of her knowledge regarding the images.
In each of these scenarios, there is a substantial risk that disclosing the abuse and/or existence of
the AI for V3 and 4, or the fact that they have been accessed by others for V1 and 2, will cause the
now-adult victim (further) harm. Although still in its infancy, research involving AI victims and
the counsellors and therapists who treat them has revealed that, besides the trauma caused by the
actual abuse, AI victims suffer additional, unique psychological harm if they are aware of the
existence of AI and that these images have been distributed on the internet (Gewirtz-Meydan et al.,
2018; Martin, 2015; 2016; von Weiler et al., 2010; Lindauer et al., 2014). The availability of the AI
224 International Review of Victimology 25(2)
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