Dr. Bryce Westlake

Bryce Westlake is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at San Jose State University, working in the field of digital forensic science. Dr. Westlake comes from an interdisciplinary background of criminology, psychology, computer science, and sexuality. He has applied that interdisciplinary lens to the study of online child sexual exploitation through examining the production and dissemination of child pornography. His current research has integrated longitudinal, automated, data mining techniques with social network analyses and the criminal career framework, to understand the evolution of child sexual exploitation websites and develop effective content identification methods and offender targeting strategies.

Contact Information:

Email: bryce.westlake@sjsu.edu

Relevant Publications:

Bouchard, M., & Westlake, B.G. (Forthcoming). Community detection in online criminal networks and its implications for research co-offending. In R. Boivin & C. Morselli (Eds.), Analysis of Criminal Networks. Montreal: The University Press.

Westlake, B.G., & Frank, R. (Forthcoming). Seeing the forest through the trees: Identifying key players in online child sexual exploitation distribution networks. In T. Holt (Ed.), Interdisciplinary Research on Cybercrime. Routledge.

Westlake, B.G., Bouchard, M., & Girodat, A. (2016). How obvious is it: The content of child sexual exploitation websites. Deviant Behavior, online first. doi: 10.1080/01639625.2016.1197001.

Westlake, B.G., & Bouchard, M. (2016). Liking and hyperlinking: Examining reciprocity and diversity in online child exploitation network communities. Social Science Research, online first. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2016.04.010.

Westlake, B.G., Bouchard, M., & Frank, R. (2015). Child Exploitation Network Extractor: Validating the use of web-crawlers for cybercrime data collection. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, online first. doi: 10.1177/1079063215616818.

Westlake, B.G., & Bouchard, M. (2015). Criminal careers in cyberspace: Examining website failure within child exploitation networks. Justice Quarterly, online first. doi: 10.1080/07418825.2015.1046393.

Westlake, B.G., Bouchard, M., & Frank, R. (August 2012). Comparing methods for detecting child exploitation content online. In Proceedings of the EISIC - European Intelligence and Security Informatics, pp. 156-163. Odense, Denmark: IEEE.

Westlake, B.G., Bouchard, M., & Frank, R. (2011). Finding the key players in online child exploitation networks. Policy and Internet, 3(2), Article 6. doi: 10.2202/1944-2866.1126.

Joffres, K., Bouchard, M., Frank, R., & Westlake, B.G. (2011). Strategies to disrupt online child pornography networks. In Proceedings of the EISIC - European Intelligence and Security Informatics, pp. 163-170. Athens, Greece: IEEE.

Frank, R., Westlake, B.G., & Bouchard, M. (August 2010). The structure and content of online child exploitation. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI-KDD 2010), Article 3. Washington, DC: ACM. doi: 10.1145/1938606.1938609.