6,000 Images and No Idea It Was a Crime: Clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen on why autistic people become both the victims and the unwitting offenders of the online world

A person on the autism spectrum leaves a file-sharing program running overnight because they want cartoons or anime. By morning, thousands of images have downloaded onto their hard drive, some of them child sexual abuse material they never chose and, in some cases, never even opened. Months later, the FBI is at the door. A judge stares at the download count and asks how anyone could not understand what they were doing.

My guest Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen, spends her working life answering that question in courtrooms across the country. She is a clinical psychologist with thirty years specializing in autism spectrum disorders and has conducted forensic evaluations of autistic defendants since 2009. Her new book, co-written with defense attorney Elizabeth Kelley and digital forensics expert Michele Bush, is Cybercrime and the Autism Spectrum: How the Online World Creates Victims and Offenders. I met Dr. Cohen at the International Academy of Law and Mental Health Congress in Montreal, and I asked her on the show the moment her presentation ended, because so much of what she described maps directly onto the recruitment tactics I have studied for five decades.

Dr. Cohen's first point cuts against the instinct to sort people into predators and prey. “Most people on the spectrum are both victimized and offenders at some point,” she told me. Cyberbullying, financial scams, and sexual exploitation run in one direction. Chat rooms that ask for “a picture of a child in your family” run in the other, quietly moving an autistic person into possession of CSAM they may never have sought out. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create distribute or possess. CSAM includes both real and synthetic content such as images created with artificial intelligence tools. Because many autistic individuals catalog and organize obsessively, agents who search a seized computer often find the material sorted into folders, which reads to an outsider as intent rather than what it frequently is: a hyperfocus trait turned against the person who has it. This is a justice issue and more people need to learn, please.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices