I am very glad I am writing this piece the day I chose, but I am also highly devastated with having decided to write this today. Today, on May 8th, 2023, it was announced that 21 year old Montclair State University student Keyon Luffy was arrested, and is set to be charged with first-degree endangering the welfare of a child for manufacturing CSAM, second-degree sexual assault, third-degree endangering the welfare of a child for possession of CSAEM, and third-degree impersonation. It was found that they had created fake social media accounts where they would engage in sexually explicit conversations with minors, and during these conversations they would, according to the Attorney General’s report, “directed children to perform sexual acts, record them, and send them to him via social media platforms”. While this incident will end with something in the realm of what one could consider, “justice”, many cases of online-only sexual abuse do not end in such a cut-and-dry manner.

 

Most sexual abuse that occurs on an online platform that does not move away into the real world falls into the category of non-contact sexual assault. According to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the United Kingdom, examples of non-contact sexual abuse include but are not limited to:

● exposing or flashing

● showing pornography

● exposing a child to sexual acts

● making them masturbate

● forcing a child to make, view or share child abuse images or videos

● making, viewing or distributing child abuse images or videos

● forcing a child to take part in sexual activities or conversations online or through a smartphone.

 

This reminded me a lot of Lotoya Peterson’s essay that was featured in the book Yes Means Yes called “The Not Rape Epidemic”.  Part of The Not Rape Epidemic goes into the various stories that Peterson heard over the years of her childhood and adolescence from her friends and other women of what is at first deemed simply as, “Not Rape”, and then properly categorized as sexual assault, statuatory rape, molestation, and coercion. From men continuing to sexually pursue girls after learning their true age, incidents of groping and incest, to the exchange of sexual favors for various things, among many other horrid acts, due to the very overly simplistic way rape tends to be viewed, many other forms of sexual abuse frequently fall into the cracks, and people are not taught how to prevent it, handle it, and support those who go through it. While I can excuse the omission of online abuse from the essay given it was originally written in 2008, and the Internet and social media were a lot different back then, I wanted to fill in the gaps of what I feel is the next wave of abuse that has fallen into the category of, “Not Rape”. Unfortunately, like what makes sense to something that falls outside of the category of our traditional view of rape or sexual assault, there isn’t a lot of statistics regarding its prevalency. The best I was able to find was a news article from two years ago which said that 500,000 online predators are online daily. When I was trying to look for stories, I only found one that included a story that the abuse stayed purely online. Not to invalidate the others, but all the other stories eventually transitioned or occurred with the understanding that there would be an in-person meetup, and while that does occur and occurs often enough to be deemed a threat by various organizations, in-person abuse is not what I want to discuss, since it is discussed plenty. So unfortunately I feel it is best that since I don’t have my own anecdotal evidence from others, that I to discuss my own experiences with online sexual abuse so maybe from that experience, it can be found in some way helpful to establishing advice and actions towards prevention from it occurring, and support for when it does.