Paper short abstract:

This paper uses feminist STS and queer studies to explore the politics of algorithmic software to detect child pornography online, and how such digital efforts mobilize a global surveillance agenda in the name of "child protection."

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with policing agencies and anti-exploitation activists in the Netherlands and Thailand, as well as with software companies in the United States, this paper focuses on recent developments in software designed to locate child abuse images ("child pornography") online.

The specter of digital child violence operates within a global affective economy (S. Ahmed 2004) of hate and fear. As images of child abuse circulate within digital space they accumulate affective value and generate a sensation of "proximate" evil, an expectation of violence always possibly near yet thwarted by national boundaries. Algorithmic techniques of search allow for the identification and sorting of images of children and sex offenders online, enabling what I call algorithmic detective work. By producing a sensation of proximity in webspace, algorithmic detectives help to collapse digital distance and generate an anticipatory politics—exemplified by technologies of prediction and search—that has already identified the objects it seeks.

Following claims from queer studies of sexuality and carcerality, I argue that designers of digital tools for child protection expand policing networks and make use of the socially symbolic child as a rallying cause for the expansion of intrusive online surveillance. The end result has been a series of transnational arrests awaiting prosecution, and not in fact a reduction in child exploitation online. The exclusionary expert politics of the current anti-trafficking movement seek quick-fix technological solutions without considering strategies for alleviating overlapping systems of structural violence that make child exploitation a current reality.