Can Artificial Intelligence Achieve Human-Level Performance? A Pilot Study of Childhood Sexual Abuse Detection in Self-Figure Drawings

University of Haifa

Delayed disclosure of childhood sexual abuse can range from one year to disclosure in adulthood, to no disclosure at all. Against this background, the ‘Draw-A-Person’ intervention has been developed by psychologists in order to detect indicators of sexual abuse in children’s self-portraits. In the present study, a convolutional neural network (CNN) was deployed to detect such indicators through image analysis. While human experts outperformed the CNN, the system still demonstrated high accuracy, suggesting that CNNs, when further developed, have potential to detect child sexual abuse.