Abstrakt

The objective of this short paper is to contribute to the discussion on the future of eXtended Reality Technologies and their implications for sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. The Open Source Intelligence Tool developed by the Dutch company Web-IQ, was used by the author of this article to search those areas of cyberspace where individuals with a potential sexual interest in children freely expressed their views among the like-minded. Their communication was searched using three search terms: „metaverse”, „virtual reality”, „augmented reality” and then analysed to find conversations that could suggest how the metaverse concept is understood in such environments. At the next step, these conversations were grouped according to recurring themes and finally interpreted. The approach outlined above has led to tentative but important insights that metaverse developers should take into account early in their work, if they want to prevent this concept from being affected by sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. In addition, this paper also calls for further research in this area.