  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 across
1341 French communes in 20 metropolitan regions of France using fine-grained
mobile traffic data of Tor network-related web services. We estimate that
approx. 0.08 % 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 0.19 % 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, 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 as another step to fulfil the global community's pledge to
target 16.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals: "End abuse, exploitation,
trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children".
