Specialised police units across the world receive hundreds of thousands of reports of child sexual exploitation (CSE) or abuse (CSA), and the resulting investigations lead to the seizure of millions of files found on digital devices. Various reporting agencies, government, and non-government organisations collect, triage, analyse, as well as store these vast volumes of data. There are prominent databases accessible to many, but not all law enforcement, and the lack of a centralised source of truth leaves the intelligence scattered. Despite quasi-structured workflows for sharing information on identified victims, or offenders, categorisation, or annotation for previously seen materials; there are significant gaps.

These intelligence sharing gaps can be compartmentalised into three areas: technical, procedural, and cultural. Warren will tell the story about how his project will use operational police data from CSE/CSA cases to examine novel approaches for deconstructing the existing constraints and how an intelligence-led policing model will draw these artefacts together to overcome the constraints in a meaningful way.

Warning messages as a situational crime prevention strategy for child sexual abuse material online have been called for over a decade. A growing number of deployments have occurred, and the evidence base is growing. This presentation will provide an overview of the empirical evidence to date, including multiple studies undertaken by the University of Tasmania, which include three experiments undertaken targeting adults in Australia, the United Kingdom, and globally, and finally a study involving 16-18 year old Australian adolescents. The presentation will also discuss a new initiative to work with industry partners to deploy messages at scale: the CSAM Deterrence Centre (led by Jesuit Social Services who operate StopItNow! Australia). Online deterrence campaigns and messaging are vital to creating an Internet that is hostile to CSAM, persuading prospective offenders from attempting to access the content as early as possible within an offending trajectory, and lowering the overall market for CSAM online. The presentation will also touch on several other research projects currently underway to disrupt CSAM offending online.

Digital evidence is estimated to be a factor in about 90% of criminal cases, and mobile phones are the most seized devices. The popularity of smartphones has also increased the ease of sharing high-quality multimedia via social media and native texting. In CSEA criminal cases, images and videos can serve as important forms of digital evidence – whether it is a “sext” sent from the offender to the victim, or child sex abuse material created by the offender. Although the offenders conceal their faces, other biometric features are present, including the dorsal side of the hand, and research has shown that knuckles and fingernail beds are valid forms of unique biometrics for identification. This presentation will discuss the research and development of the Suspect Hand Biometrics Tool – a digital forensics tool that automatically processes images and videos to extract knuckle and fingernail bed biometrics. We will provide use cases demonstrating the Suspect Hand Biometrics Tool, which will be free of charge for law enforcement. In addition, cases will be presented that outline the process for conducting and presenting forensic hand comparisons in court as evidence. Finally, we will include recommendations on collecting comparison and exemplar imagery for law enforcement investigations that require forensic hand comparisons.