Selected publications are shown below, a complete listing can be found here.
Bouchard, M., Davies, G., Frank, R., Wu, Edith, & Joffres, K. (2020). Social structure of extremist websites. In J. Littlewood & L. L. Dawson (Eds.), Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Through close analysis of the Canadian context, Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Canada provides an advanced introduction to the challenges and social consequences presented by terrorism today. Featuring contributions from both established and emerging scholars, it tackles key issues within this fraught area and does so from multiple disciplinary perspectives, using historical, quantitative, and qualitative lenses of analyses...
Levey, P., & Bouchard, M. (2019). The emergence of violent narratives in the life-course trajectories of online forum participants. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology, 6(3), 1-28.
Online discussion forums have been identified as an online social milieu that may facilitate the radicalization process, or the development of violent narratives for a minority of participants, notably youth. Yet, very little is known on the nature of the conversations youth have online, the emotions they convey, and whether or how the sentiments expressed...
Westlake, B. G., & Bouchard, M. (2016). Liking and hyperlinking: Community detection in online child sexual exploitation networks. Social Science Research, 59, 23-36.
The online sexual exploitation of children is facilitated by websites that form virtual communities, via hyperlinks, to distribute images, videos, and other material. However, how these communities form, are structured, and evolve over time is unknown. Collected using a custom-designed webcrawler, we begin from known child sexual exploitation (CE) seed websites and follow hyperlinks to...
G. Westlake, B., & Bouchard, M. (2016). Criminal careers in cyberspace: Examining website failure within child exploitation networks. Justice Quarterly, 33(7), 1154-1181.
Publicly accessible, illegal, websites represents an additional challenge for control agencies, but also an opportunity for researchers to monitor, in real-time, changes in criminal careers. Using a repeated measures design, we examine evolution in the networks that form around child exploitation (CE) websites, over a period of sixty weeks, and determine which criminal career dimensions...
Joffres, K., Bouchard, M. (2015). Vulnerabilities in online child pornography networks. In Aili Malm and Gisela Bichler (Eds), Disrupting Criminal networks: Network Analysis in Crime Prevention. Crime Prevention Studies, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
Rienner Amazon
Bouchard, M. (2014). Outils et méthodes pour la construction et l’analyse des réseaux illicites sur Internet. Revue Internationale de Criminologie et de Police Technique et Scientifique, 67, 317-337.
On sait maintenant que l’arrivée du Web a complètement changé la donne en ce qui concerne l’exploitation des jeunes à des fins sexuelles, alors que pédophiles et autres amateurs de pornographie juvénile profitent désormais de la toile pour consommer, distribuer, échanger du matériel. Ils profitent également de ces réseaux virtuels pour «socialiser» avec d’autres qui...
Westlake, B., Bouchard, M., Frank, R. (2011). Finding the key players in online child exploitation networks. Policy and Internet, 3(6), 1-32.
The growth of the Internet has been paralleled with a similar growth in online child exploitation. Since completely shutting down child exploitation websites is difficult (or arguably impossible), the goal must be to find the most efficient way of identifying the key targets and then to apprehend them. Traditionally, online investigations have been manual and...