Secrecy, control and violence in women's intimate relationships with child sexual abuse material offenders

Abstract

Many child sexual abuse material (CSAM) offenders have non-offending partners and children who are impacted by their CSAM use. However, the specific dynamics of CSAM offending within a relationship or family context have been overlooked in forensic research, while scholarship on domestic violence and coercive control has not focused on CSAM offending as a possible correlate of domestic abuse. This paper presents the findings of the first study to examine the crossover between domestic violence, coercive control and CSAM offending in intimate relationships.