Old crimes reported in new bottles

The disclosure of child sexual abuse on Twitter through the case #MeTooInceste

Bibliographic Data

ID4697379
AuthorsJesús C Aguerri (0000-0002-7730-8527, Universitat de Miguel Hernández d'Elx, corresponding author), L Molnar (0000-0001-8692-9256, University of Lausanne), Fernando Miró-Llinares (0000-0001-6379-5857, Universitat de Miguel Hernández d'Elx)
Year2023
Volume13
Issue1
Publication date2023-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Network Analysis and Mining (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1869-5450 • E-ISSN: 1869-5469
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s13278-023-01029-4
OpenAlexW4318832645
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited61

Movements such as #MeToo have shown how an online trend can become the vehicle for collectively sharing personal experiences of sexual victimisation that often remains unreported to the criminal justice system. These social media trends offer new opportunities to social scientists who investigate complex phenomena that, despite existing since time immemorial, are still taboo and difficult to access. They also bring technical difficulties, as the challenge to identify reports of victimisation, and new questions about the characteristic of the events, the role that victimisation testimonies play and the capacity to detect them by analysing their characteristics. To address these issues, we collected 91,501 tweets under the hashtag #MeTooInceste, posted from the 20 to 27 January 2021. A model was fitted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation that detected 1688 tweets disclosing experiences of child sexual abuse, with an accuracy of 91.3% [± 3%] and a recall of 93.1% [± 5%]. We performed Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations on the tweets identified as disclosures of victimisation and found that long tweets posted by users with small accounts, without URL or picture, were more likely to be related to disclosure of child sexual abuse. We discuss the possibilities of these trends and techniques offer for research and practice

Child sexual abuse · Criminology · Internet privacy · Poison control · Political science · Sexual abuse · Social media · Suicide prevention · Taboo · Victimisation · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Medicine · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access