Being Under Pressure to Sext: Adolescents' Experiences, Reactions, and Counter-Strategies.

This study explored adolescents' experiences of being under pressure to sext (sending nude images), offering insights into what situations adolescents view as pressuring, how adolescents react to the pressure, and what counter-strategies they use. Written statements from 225 adolescents (age 13-16 years, M = 14.4 years, SD = 0.93) were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results indicated a range of situations including both explicit and implicit pressure. The pressure elicited different emotional responses, including severe physical and psychological reactions, becoming distressed, and being seemingly unconcerned. A majority of the adolescents reported successful strategies on how to ward off the unwanted sexual requests. This study provides insight into how young people cope with potentially harmful situations online.

Swedish and Norwegian Police Interviewers' Goals, Tactics, and Emotions When Interviewing Suspects of Child Sexual Abuse.

As the suspect interview is one of the key elements of a police investigation, it has received a great deal of merited attention from the scientific community. However, suspect interviews in child sexual abuse (CSA) investigations is an understudied research area. In the present mixed-methods study, we examine Swedish (n = 126) and Norwegian (n = 52) police interviewers' self-reported goals, tactics, and emotional experiences when conducting interviews with suspected CSA offenders. The quantitative analyses found associations between the interviewers' self-reported goals, tactics, and emotions during these types of suspect interviews. Interviewers who reported experiencing more negative emotions were more likely to employ confrontational tactics. Specifically, anger was positively associated with the goal of obtaining a confession and with aggressive tactics like raising one's voice and emphasizing the seriousness of the crime. Frustration and disgust displayed similar patterns. Somewhat contrasting these quantitative results, the thematic analysis identified a strong consensus that emotions should not and do not affect the police interviewers' work. Furthermore, the police interviewers described a range of strategies for managing emotions during the interview and for processing their emotional reactions afterwards. The present findings highlight the relevance of emotional processes in CSA suspect interviews and provide an initial exploration of the potentially complex relationship between the goals, tactics, and emotional experiences of police interviewers who question CSA suspects.

Offender strategies for engaging children in online sexual activity.

BACKGROUND: Following technological developments, there has been increasing interest in online offenders' use of digital communication technology to sexually groom and abuse children. However, research has thus far primarily explored offenders' interactions with decoys instead of actual children, and initial evidence indicates that conversations with actual children may include more overt persuasion and extortion than conversations with decoys. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to describe online offenders' interactions with actual children when inciting them to engage in online sexual activity. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Swedish court judgements including 50 offenders (aged 16-69, median = 28.9) and 122 child victims (aged 7-17, median = 13.0) were analyzed. METHODS: By using an explorative mixed-methods approach, we thematically analyzed what strategies the children were exposed to, and looked for patterns between the strategy used and the characteristics of the abuse, victim, or offender. RESULTS: We identified two types of strategies that the children were exposed to: pressure (threats, bribes, or nagging, N = 56), and sweet-talk (flattery, acting as a friend, or expressing love, N = 25). Overall, the offenders who used pressure were younger and targeted older children than the offenders who used sweet-talk. CONCLUSIONS: This study expands the existing knowledge about the variety of manipulative strategies used by online offenders and adds support to the initial literature showing substantially more pressure and coercion in online offenders' interactions with actual children. The study also identifies some patterns between the strategy used and the age of the offender and victim that warrant further investigation in future studies.

"All of Me Is Completely Different": Experiences and Consequences Among Victims of Technology-Assisted Child Sexual Abuse.

The aim of the present study was to gain a first-person perspective on the experiences of technology-assisted child sexual abuse (TA-CSA), and a deeper understanding of the way it may affect its victims. Seven young women (aged 17-24) with experience of TA-CSA before the age of 18 participated in individual in-depth interviews. The interviews were teller-focused with the aim of capturing the interviewee's own story about how they made sense of their experiences over time, and what impact the victimization had on them in the short and long terms. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed a broad range of abusive experiences that had profoundly impacted the individuals' lives, health and self-concepts. Three dominant themes emerged from the analysis - From thrilling to abusive, Negative effect on health and wellbeing, and A new self after the abuse. From thrilling to abusive captures the wide range of experiences described, starting from the child's own sexual curiosity to descriptions of having been manipulated or threatened into engaging in sexual activity, as well as the sometimes long and complex process of understanding the severity of one's experiences. Negative effect on health and wellbeing describes the victimization's comprehensive impact on the life and health of the participants, how they blamed themselves for what had happened, and the struggle of having to live with the constant fear of pictures from the abuse resurfacing. A new self after the abuse depicts how the victimization impacted the way participants viewed and thought about themselves in relation to others, and distorted their views of their bodies. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research on both offline CSA and TA-CSA, as well as theoretical and practical implications.

Can rapport building strategies, age, and question type influence preschoolers' disclosures of adult wrongdoing?

In the present experiment, we examined preschoolers' disclosures of a secret as a function of rapport building strategies used in Scandinavian field settings (verbal rapport building vs. prop rapport building), age in months (33-75 months) and question type (open-ended free recall invitation vs. suggestive questions). Fifty-three preschoolers (M = 60.5 months old, SD = 11.4) witnessed a researcher break a toy and were asked to keep the toy breakage a secret. The children were thereafter interviewed about the incident. Overall, 18.9% of the children disclosed the secret after an open-ended free recall invitation. The disclosure rate rose to 83% after the final phase of the interviews when questions containing suggestive details were asked of the children. Notably, we did not observe any significant effects as a function of manipulating rapport building strategy. A linear regression model showed that child age (in months) significantly predicted the amount of reported details, with younger preschoolers reporting fewer details compared to older preschoolers. Age also predicted the amount of correct details, but not the amount of incorrect details. No age differences were found with regard to children's disclosure tendencies or proportion of central details about the secret. Methodological limitations and practical implications will be addressed.