Online child sexual abuse is a concern for many parents, practitioners and policy makers. One dominant fear is that of the stranger approaching children online (Ofcom, 2018a), lurking in chatrooms masquerading as a child in order to lure victims for abusive ends (Taylor, 2010). This type of abuse is often drawn to the attention of the public in the popular press (Marcum, 2007). Yet other forms of online-facilitated child sexual abuse may be more prevalent. These reflect a growing fluidity between the online and offline worlds. Child sexual abuse can also begin offline and become online through filming or photography, or it can be virtual, such as in the distribution of child abuse images. It can occur between children and adults or between peers, both known and ‘friended’, as well as strangers. In what Castells (2000) first called the ‘Network Society’, distinctions between online-and offline-facilitated child sexual abuse are increasingly blurred.

Children and young people are living in a digital world where online/offline distinctions do not always represent separate social spaces. The online environment now mediates a multitude of childhood activities, such that analysing online/offline distinctions in the different forms that child sexual abuse takes is challenging. For example, over the past decade, the use of digital technology has rapidly expanded both the opportunities for, and the scale of, trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation through false work advertisements, cryptocurrency payment – which is harder to trace – and the production of false documentation on the ‘darknet’ (Europol, 2014; Hughes, 2014; Leary, 2014; Sarkar, 2015). The internet has become an essential component in the procurement of children, demand for child sex, the business dealings of sex traffickers and the detection of children who have been trafficked for the purposes of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation (Sykiotou, 2007; Latonero, 2011, 2012). So, while much of the activity is offline (transportation, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation), it is mediated by many things (Global Positioning System – GPS – navigation, mobile phones, money exchange and so on) connected in various ways to the internet. Creating a dualism between reality and virtual reality is a false one, since all activities in everyday life are mediated in some aspect, and increasingly that mediation has an online component.