The Reward Foundation has just published a new book, Autism, Pornography and Online Sexual Offending. Prepare to be shocked. It deals with one of society’s biggest taboos – online sexual offending against children. It does so in a courageous, nuanced and compassionate way using medical research and evidence from real life. How would you react if this happened to a man you know? Read the book then make up your mind. Here is the paperback version. It’s also available on Kindle.
Who should read it?
We have written this book for pornography users, autistic people, their families, criminal justice and healthcare professionals, social workers and children’s services, teachers, school leaders, politicians and media professionals. The aim is to help them understand why autistic men are disproportionately represented in rates of online sexual offending against children. The next step is to focus on what we can do to reduce this. We examine the escalating pathways of pornography use into watching child sexual abuse material (CSAM). We also look at appropriate treatment and prevention with useful tips for institutions and families.
There are over 4 million dedicated porn websites. They are available to anyone with an internet device and much is available on social media and video games too. In one month alone, May 2025, UK users made over a billion visits to porn sites. (Similarweb, 2025).
Why is it needed?
The prevalence of autism in the general population is between 1% and 3% (National Autistic Society, 2023). At the same time, experienced staff of the UK’s largest charity specialising in preventing child sexual abuse, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF), estimate that around 25% of the offending men they see are autistic. Many of those men have not been officially assessed for autism. So, in theory, the percentage of those charged with accessing CSAM and being autistic could be even higher.
What is it about autism that makes autistic men more vulnerable to downloading child sexual abuse material and ending up mired in the criminal justice system? The vast majority are first-time offenders. The impact of being charged leads to a heightened risk of suicide.
“Perpetrators who view child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) are not only at higher risk of suicide than the general population, individuals diagnosed with a mental health disorder, and perpetrators of other violent and sexual crimes, but they also appear to be at higher risk of suicide than perpetrators of CSA who engage directly in sexual acts with a child… An in-depth understanding of the experiences of CSAM offenders is missing in the literature, but is required to understand how to mitigate the risk of suicide amongst this high-risk group.” (Kothari et al., 2021)
What is it all about?
In this book we will examine several themes. These include: the nature of autism; the challenge for autistic men in today’s world of free streaming internet pornography; experiencing “the knock” from the police for offenders and their families. We also examine why the criminal justice system needs to look afresh at the nature of the deviant mindset in regard to this type of offending . There is an urgency for prevention strategies, diversion and post-conviction treatment options. We look too at how others can help prevent such offending.
Online child sexual abuse material includes everything from the nude images and videos children send to one another, to an adult looking at a sexual image of a child in a legal adult website or in a WhatsApp message, to sexualised discussions and exchange of images in chatrooms to online grooming with a view to raping a child in person.
How severe are these offences?
While none of these offences is victimless, there is a significant difference in the severity of the various offences. With no end in sight to the increase in rates of criminal activity, it is clear that criminal justice authorities need to take a more nuanced approach to dealing with it. Healthcare and education professionals must become aware of the drivers too of such offences especially in what appears to be especially vulnerable groups, adolescents in general and autistic people in particular. Addiction or compulsive sexual behaviour disorder plays a central role.
It is an extremely sensitive subject. The media and public at large tend to treat all child sexual abuse offenders, whatever the severity of their offence, as equally hateful. They almost always describe them as “paedophiles” and “monsters” who should be locked up for a very long time. They are not all the same. Unless we understand the ways into this form of offending and tackle the escalating pathways head on, online sexual offending will continue to proliferate.
What is the risk of going from watching online sexual abuse to committing contact offences?
In the book (page 8) where we state in bold “Only two percent of those charged move to contact offending. Only three percent of those caught viewing CSAM reoffend.” It is missing the relevant research citation. However we relied on this research: “Within a smaller subsample of 1,247 individuals from the same group, 2% escalated to commit an offline contact sexual offense against children, and 3% reoffended with an offense related to CSEM. Only two per cent of those charged move to contact offending over 1.5–6 years of follow‑up.” (Seto and Elke, 2017).
That earlier work by Seto and Elke was re‑analysed in later reviews. They are Online Sexual Offending Against Children: Recidivism Rates and Predictors and by “Recidivism rates among online child sexual exploitation material offenders: systematic review and meta-analyses“. This latter review only came to our attention after publication. It was published online in December 2025. This 2025 meta‑analysis of over 15,000 online CSAM offenders found that about 3.4% were reconvicted for any sexual offence, around 3.0–3.3% for another CSAM offence specifically, and only about 0.5–0.7% for a contact sexual offence over an average follow‑up of roughly four years.”
This latest study matches an earlier one from Switzerland that was cited in the Debunking of the Butner Report referenced in the book.
“In the six years before the 2002 police operation, only 1% were known to have committed a hands-on offense. And only 1% of the men committed a hands-on sex offense in the six years afterward. As important as the significant difference in this study‘s results (1% vs. Hernandez‘ and Bourke‘s 85%) is its adherence to widely-accepted scientific methodology and transparency. The researchers even took the added step of seeking ethical and judicial approval before the study began.”
These two latter studies are even stronger evidence of the low risk of reoffending especially to any crossover to contact offending, which is what worries criminal justice authorities the most.
Role of the Porn Industry
Above all, we have to examine the success thus far of the predatory, multibillion dollar pornography industry’s strategy to suppress key evidence of the health risks of their defective product. Addiction and problematic use of pornography lead many users to escalate to watching illegal images and in some cases to contact offending. [See our earlier blogs on The Pornography Industry’s Disinformation Campaign on Addiction Recovery Resources, and “Creating disinformation: Archiving fake links on the Wayback Machine through the lens of routine activity theory”.]
This book will focus on a narrow but significant group of perpetrators who are themselves victims to some extent. That is not to exonerate them but to understand the hidden pathways towards offending so that we can prevent it and the high number of associated suicides.
Risk of Suicide
We hear from three autistic men convicted of downloading indecent images of children. To protect their privacy, they are going by the names of Jack, PJ and Henry. They all feature throughout the book. Each man has escalated to viewing indecent images of children. They all have a diagnosis of autism. The criminal justice system from detection, conviction and punishment to rehabilitation has played a life changing role in their lives. Each has been at a high risk of suicide. Their journeys are quite different. Yet they provide a rich picture of how autism, pornography and online offending can combine to ruin lives, destroy families and harm society.
While most offenders are in their 30s or 40s when arrested for downloading indecent images of children or being engaged in chatrooms, the seeds of their demise are sown in their teen years when they became fascinated by pornography and, or suffered emotional or sexual trauma of some kind. This is why we will examine the unique features of the adolescent brain and why some autistic adolescents may be at heightened risk for online sexual offending.
Need for a different approach
There is often a strong belief in the criminal justice sector that we contest. That is that being an online offender “materially increases the risk” of a person becoming an in-person, contact offender. In this book we will argue that the latest research about internet pornography shows it can drive non-paedophilic persons, including some autistic men to illegal material. This occurs when they escalate to consuming the freely available images and videos of children on legal adult pornography sites, social media and in chatrooms. The latest research indicates that less than one percent of these men transform into contact offenders.(See above). In a legal and social world with very finite resources, there is great potential for using the different behavioural profiles of these offender groups to society’s advantage and looking to use diversion from the criminal justice system where possible.
We focus on the downloading of indecent images of children and chatroom activity. But we will also consider the twilight area of mixed offending where groomers initially contact children online in chatrooms. We ask whether spending time out in such environments might lead an unwary autistic person, to engage in contact offending further down the line.
It is very clear that we have not yet reached ‘peak porn’. Also escalation to illegal material will continue for a long time to come. This already has devastating implications for society.
Layout
There are two parts to the book. Part one, chapters one to eight, deals with the general context of online sexual offending in autistic men. Part two, chapters nine to sixteen, focuses on how to support men through the justice process. They also deal with what families and professionals can do to prevent future reoffending. In the end to reduce this form of offending, we need to understand the root causes.
