Public Employees’ Level of Awareness and Perception on Sexual Abuse of Children in Online Environments: Turkey Case

The purpose of this study is to measure the level of awareness and perception of Turkish public personnel working in public institutions regarding the problem of online child pornography. Participants include 100 public officials positioned in various ministries. Quantitative research method was used in order to obtain information from participants. A questionnaire was submitted to the participants with meetings in person or via the Internet and data were collected. In order to ensure reliability and validity issues, expert opinion was sought as a means to measure validity and reliability. Necessary corrections were made based on the feedback provided. Outputs from the questionnaire were analyzed using the SPSS and the findings were evaluated.  The results showed that participants are rather young with high education levels, well-versed in national regulations, they have the knowledge about digital citizenship; however, it was found that they were not informed about technical issues such as international activities related to child pornography (CP), online child pornography, Darknet, p2p networks and hash databases. The findings showed that the reason behind the lack of awareness on some of these phenomena was the inherent problems in the education system and the insufficiency of the curriculum. Findings clearly show that it is necessary to establish an organic network among several ministries which are responsible for the fight with child pornography. Furthermore, to create a national CP images (Hash) database which can detect the IP number and other information of the ones who share such images online using a national analysis software is another solution proposed. RECEIVED 28 November 2016, REVISED 14 December 2017, ACCEPTED 14 December 2017