Child pornography represents a severe form of exploitation and victimization of children, leaving the victims with emotional and physical trauma. In this study, we aim to analyze local patterns of child pornography consumption in 20 metropolitan regions of France using fine-grained mobile traffic data of Tor network-related web services. We estimate that approx. 3.3 % of Tor mobile download traffic observed in France is linked to the consumption of child sexual abuse materials by correlating it with local-level temporal porn consumption patterns. This compares to 0.2 % of what we conservatively estimate to be the share of child pornographic content in global Tor traffic. In line with existing literature on the link between sexual child abuse and the consumption of image-based content thereof, we observe a positive and statistically significant effect of our child pornography consumption estimates on the reported number of victims of sexual violence and vice versa across 1341 French communes, which validates our findings, after controlling for a set of spatial and non-spatial features including socio-demographic characteristics, voting behaviour, nearby points of interest and Google Trends queries. While this is a first, exploratory attempt to look at child pornography from a spatial epidemiological angle, we believe this research provides public health officials with valuable information to prioritize target areas for public awareness campaigns and hopefully inform future paths of research in that area.

翻译：儿童色情是对儿童的一种严重剥削和伤害形式，给受害者造成情感和身体创伤。本研究利用Tor网络相关Web服务的精细移动流量数据，旨在分析法国20个大都市地区儿童色情消费的地方模式。通过将Tor移动下载流量与地方级时间色情消费模式相关联，我们估计法国观察到的Tor移动下载流量中约有3.3%与儿童性虐待材料的消费有关。相比之下，我们保守估计全球Tor流量中儿童色情内容的占比为0.2%。与现有关于性虐待儿童与相关图像内容消费之间联系的文献一致，我们观察到在控制了包括社会人口特征、投票行为、附近兴趣点和Google Trends查询在内的一组空间与非空间特征后，我们的儿童色情消费估计值与法国1341个市镇报告的性暴力受害者数量之间存在统计上显著的正向相互影响，这验证了我们的发现。虽然这是首次从空间流行病学角度探索儿童色情问题的尝试，但我们相信这项研究为公共卫生官员提供了有价值的信息，有助于确定公众意识宣传活动的优先目标区域，并有望为该领域未来的研究方向提供参考。