About the project

Commercial stakeholders are already using this technology in marketing and customer contact, for everything from tracking a company’s online reputation or optimising a chatbot, to behavioural marketing or keeping a user engaged as long as possible in a gaming environment or on social media (SOME). But what if such technology could also prevent sexual exploitation and child abuse?

Professor Inger Marie Sunde at the Norwegian Police University College (PHS) felt inspired to consider that idea a few years ago. Part of the inspiration was the Sweetie project at Leiden University, in which a chatbot was developed in the form of a computer-generated, ten-year-old girl from the Philippines. ‘She’ was able to observe and automatically participate in chat rooms, and her purpose was to prevent sexual exploitation of children via webcams. The project reportedly detected over 1,000 online abusers.

Professor Sunde has since written two academic articles, co-authored by her colleague Nina Sunde, on how a PrevBOT could prevent attempts to exploit children.

Read: Part 1 - The Theoretical and Technical Foundations for PrevBOT

Read: Part 2 – Legal Analysis of PrevBOT

The PrevBOT project is organised as a research project consisting of several work packages, where the role of the PHS is to lead the project and the various stakeholders. There are a number of stakeholders involved in the work, including the Police IT Unit (PIT), the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) at the University of Agder (UiA) and Kripos national criminal investigation service.

Abuse – from offline to online

Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) did not originate with the internet, but the digitisation of society has given abusers new and easily accessible places where children come together, often without parental supervision. So with the internet, smart phones and the advent of social media and chat rooms, it is now easier for sexual abusers to make contact with minors to exploit. This is reflected in the dramatic increase in reports of CSEA.

It is often in chat rooms that abusers make contact with potential victims. Gaming platforms and social networks with messaging features are also places where abusers initiate contact with children. Once contact and interest are established, the abusers will often try to manoeuvre the conversation and further grooming to hidden forums, in the form of direct messaging.

Purely online abuse

The digital age has also brought with it a new form of sexual exploitation: purely online abuse. The abuse often takes place in the child’s own bedroom while the parents remain oblivious to the ongoing crimes. Children are coaxed into performing sexual acts in front of the camera, either alone or with someone else. This kind of violation can feel just as severe, and is both prolonged and intensified by the knowledge that a recording most likely exists somewhere ‘out there’. Such exploitation material is often shared on the dark web. 

Public health issues

‘Highly active offenders have often been able to operate undisturbed for extensive periods of time, allowing them to make contact with perhaps several hundreds of victims before being stopped,’ according to a report from the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies (NKVTS) and NOVA Norwegian Social Research at OsloMet. The report was released in January 2024, and its sources speak of a tenfold increase in the problem in the past decade. There are now more cases, they are larger in scale and their content is more severe.

See also NRK’s review of the report: ‘Grovere, hardere, kaldere' (‘Cruder, rougher and more chilling’ – in Norwegian only)

Experience from Norwegian criminal cases shows that, using the internet, perpetrators can commit abuse against a huge number of children at the same time. This was rarely the case before the internet, but with it, we have seen cases such as a 27-year-old who abused 270 children, predominantly boys under the age of 14, over a period of two-and-a-half years.

The Ombudsperson for Children referred to it as a public health problem when the report ‘Alle kjenner noen som har opplevd det’ (‘Everyone knows someone who has experienced it’ – in Norwegian only) was published in 2018. A survey conducted by NKVTS in 2020 showed that 4.5 per cent of the young participants had experienced sexual exploitation from an adult in the past year, while the National Safety Survey 2022 showed that 12 per cent of girls and 2.6 per cent of boys between the ages of 16 and 19 had been exposed to digital sexual violence in the past year.

It should nonetheless be pointed out that most sexual assaults are committed by individuals of a similar age or close relatives, something PrevBOT, as it is conceived, will be unable to prevent. However, with a sharp increase in online grooming and purely online abuse, an effective weapon to combat the issue will have a noticeable impact on the overall picture.

International cooperation

An international cooperation has been established in an attempt to combat online CSEA. In 2017, the EU made online CSEA one of the top ten priority issues within organised and serious international crime. Despite these efforts, the number of cases and victims is on the rise. As such, it is not sufficient just to pursue abusers in an attempt to tackle the issue through investigation.

Preventive measures are essential.