“Once you see it you can't unsee it”: Law enforcement trauma and immersion in child sexual abuse material

Abstract

Background

Police working with child sexual abuse material (CSAM) have a complex and significant job. Their experiences have potential to cause trauma, and so to inform better responses and supports, more must be understood about their work from their perspectives.

Objective

This article focuses on internet child exploitation law enforcement (ICE LE) experiences and perspectives regarding the impacts of working with CSAM, trauma, and implications for professional practice.

Participants and setting

The sample encompassed 27 ICE LE investigators and supervisors in Ontario, Canada whose main job is investigations involving CSAM.

Methods

Three focus groups were conducted with participants, followed by an inductive thematic analysis, whereby themes were developed through a multi-stage process of coding and clustering.

Findings

Instead of simply viewing, seeing, hearing, being exposed to, or working with CSAM, participants described immersion in/with the material. Framed within a taxonomy of trauma focusing on events, experiences, and effects, participants described being warned about the depravity and difficulty of CSAM, continually seeing and hearing distressing content, working closely with CSAM, and being greatly impacted by audio. They reported effects including shock, never forgetting CSAM, feeling suspicious, and wanting distance.

Conclusion

Events, experiences, and effects were recounted as experiential and detrimental. Therefore, it is more accurate to categorise participants’ immersion in/with CSAM as a direct experience of primary trauma, not “secondary” or “vicarious” trauma. Implications for multiple sectors involved in child protection and practice are discussed.