Unveiling Local Patterns of Child Pornography Consumption in France using Tor

Child pornography represents a severe form of exploitation and victimization of children, leaving the victims with emotional and physical trauma. In this study, we aim to analyze local patterns of child pornography consumption in 20 metropolitan regions of France using fine-grained mobile traffic data of Tor network-related web services. We estimate that approx. 3.3 % of Tor mobile download traffic observed in France is linked to the consumption of child sexual abuse materials by correlating it with local-level temporal porn consumption patterns. This compares to 0.2 % of what we conservatively estimate to be the share of child pornographic content in global Tor traffic. In line with existing literature on the link between sexual child abuse and the consumption of image-based content thereof, we observe a positive and statistically significant effect of our child pornography consumption estimates on the reported number of victims of sexual violence and vice versa across 1341 French communes, which validates our findings, after controlling for a set of spatial and non-spatial features including socio-demographic characteristics, voting behaviour, nearby points of interest and Google Trends queries. While this is a first, exploratory attempt to look at child pornography from a spatial epidemiological angle, we believe this research provides public health officials with valuable information to prioritize target areas for public awareness campaigns and hopefully inform future paths of research in that area.