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Ted Cross

Ted Cross

Senior Research Specialist and Research Professor at the Children and Family Research Center, University of Illinois, specializing in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) research and child maltreatment investigation.

Jul 9, 2026

6:02
And so can you talk to us a little bit about, first of all, what were the research questions you were particularly interested in, and then how did you design your study to examine those questions?
6:13
We were interested in The nature of the abuse portrayed in the CSAM material, the severity, and which particular categories of children were involved in the most severe abuse represented in the child sexual abuse material.
6:37
I mean, uh, actually looking at the CSAM itself would raise enormous ethical questions.
6:43
It would certainly put our own mental health at risk.
6:47
Uh, I mean, this was stressful as it was.
6:50
So we used a proxy method in which we work with the Child Rescue Coalition, which is intercepting this information continuously, has data on millions of files, millions of postings of this material, and then shares this, that information with law enforcement to, uh, assist with enforcement in actually identifying and prosecuting offenders.
7:16
The Child Rescue Coalition, along with capturing the files in their database, captured the file names of the files, just the file names.

7 MINS LATER

14:39
But if you're a CPS worker, if you're a forensic interviewer in a children's advocacy center, how does it influence your work knowing more, based on this study, about possibly the content of all of the sort of CSAM material that exists related to these cases?

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