The 3rd National Online Victimization Study (NJOV-3) is the third wave of a longitudinal study. Wave 1 (NJOV-1) pertained to arrests for technology-facilitated crimes (e.g., sex offenders using the Internet to meet minors, solicitations to undercover investigators posing online as minors, downloading of child pornography) that occurred between July 1, 2000 and June 30, 2001; Wave 2 (NJOV-2) pertained to arrests during 2006. NJOV-3 collected data about technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation crimes ending in arrest in 2009 . For each wave of the NJOV Arrest Study, data was collected in two phases. Phase 1 was mail survey of a national sample of law enforcement agencies that asked if agencies had made arrests for technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation crimes during a specific time frame. Phase 2 was telephone interviews with investigators to collect details about individual cases reported in the mail surveys. The goal of this methodology was to 1) utilize a representative national sample of law enforcement agencies that would give us an overall picture of these crimes in the United States, 2) understand how these cases emerged and were handled in a diverse group of agencies, 3) get detailed data about the characteristics of these crimes from well-informed, reliable sources, and 4) see how the prevalence and characteristics of such crimes may have changed over time.

Investigators: Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D, & Mitchell, K. J.