Judith Schumann’s research while affiliated with MSB Medical School Berlin and other places

To date, the possession of purely text-based child sexual exploitation material, in contrast to photographic and videographic depictions, is not punishable in Germany. For the first time, the current article shows to what extent stories from a so-called girl lover forum on the darknet address sexualized violence against children. Based on a textual formal analysis of the content of the stories, it was possible to prove that these stories contain non-sexualized depictions of children but first and foremost descriptions of severe sexual abuse. Due to the sexualized incentives and the recurring descriptions of sexual acts presented in the stories, children were exposed by the authors in a way that should be prosecuted under German law (§ 184b German Criminal Code, StGB). As measured by the Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe (COPINE) scale (Taylor et al. 2001), the severity of child sexual abuse depicted in the “girl lover” stories (> 8) is notably higher than in previously evaluated image-based and video-based child sexual abuse material collections (e.g., Fortin and Proulx 2019) that depicted children of comparable ages (at just under 10 years old; COPINE = 4–6). In addition, the stories from the “girl lover” forum that were examined often contained the authors’ assumptions about how children experience sexual acts. Here, cognitive distortions are unmistakable, especially false assumptions about interest in and physical reactions to sexual acts by children, about consensual sexual contact and romantic attachment, and representations in which the child is reduced to an adult sexual object available at any time. In conclusion, we argue that the risk posed by the stories is that their consumption can stimulate fantasies of child sexual abuse and reinforce cognitive distortions of the normality of child sexual abuse behavior.