Abstract
This essay is a cultural study of child sexual abuse’s (CSA) (non)representation in media, considering the mass cultural echoes that emerge from this criminal subject. Here, existing legal scholarship pertaining to child abuse images contextualises the urgency of this crime when considering its translation into broader popular cultures. This is with the intention of identifying and interrogating the power dynamics and references to violence lingering behind online cultural depictions of CSA, in order to analyse the ethical implications of digital audience participation within such representations. The case of the convicted CS abuser Peter Scully, whose real-world crimes were transformed into online myth-making, is utilised as a central example, and is located within existing horror stories surrounding the dark web and the research on creepypasta and digital myth-making put forward by Shira Chess and Eric Newsome (Chess, Newsome, 2014).
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Lamont, B. (2022). Unseeable Abuse: The Impossible Act of Visualising Childhood Sexual Abuse in Digital Cultures and Technology. In: Choe, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05390-0_19
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