Around two crore children aged 12 to 17 across 21 countries experienced at least one form of sexual exploitation or abuse involving digital technology in a single year, according to a new UNICEF report that exposes how deeply such harm has entered everyday online spaces.
The findings are based on nationally representative surveys of around 21,000 internet-using children, along with detailed interviews with 100 young people who experienced abuse during childhood. UNICEF estimates that almost one in five internet-using children across the countries studied were affected. India was not among the countries surveyed.
The scale could be substantially higher than the estimates suggest.
Less than 1% of experiences were reported to police, social workers or helplines, UNICEF found. More than four in ten children told nobody at all.
Algoritha Security Launches ‘Make in India’ Cyber Lab for Educational Institutions
Unwanted Content, Sexual Pressure and Images Shared Without Consent
The report, Through Children’s Eyes: How Digital Technologies Enable Child Sexual Abuse, estimates that more than 1.5 crore children were exposed to unwanted sexual content.
Around 90 lakh were pressured to participate in sexual conversations or share sexual images against their will. Another 40 lakh had sexual images of themselves circulated without consent.
The abuse was closely tied to platforms children routinely use.
Nearly 60% of cases involved mainstream social media, while around 14% occurred through online games. UNICEF identified Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok among the platforms most commonly mentioned by children.
Platform-level data cited from the report showed Facebook in 50% of relevant cases, followed by WhatsApp at 29%, Instagram at 24%, Snapchat at 13% and TikTok at 12%. These figures can overlap because an incident may involve more than one service.
The findings challenge another common assumption: that the danger mainly comes from strangers.
UNICEF found that 57% of cases involved someone the child already knew, including friends, peers, romantic partners or family members. In 38% of cases, the child first encountered the perpetrator online.
What ‘Technology-Facilitated Sexual Abuse’ Actually Means
The term is broader than someone simply sending illegal images online.
Technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse covers situations where phones, social networks, games, messaging apps or other digital tools are used to expose a child to sexual material, pressure them for images, manipulate them into sexual conversations, threaten them, circulate intimate material or enable abuse that later happens offline.
Another increasingly important term is sexual deepfake.
A deepfake is an image, video or audio file created or manipulated using artificial intelligence so that it appears real. So-called “nudification” tools can take an ordinary photograph of a child and fabricate a sexualised or nude-looking version without the child ever producing such an image.
The abuse is not harmless simply because the picture is artificial.
In February, UNICEF said evidence collected with ECPAT and INTERPOL across 11 countries indicated that at least 12 lakh children had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes during the previous year.
The Damage Continues Long After an Image Is Shared
The UNICEF findings also show that online sexual abuse cannot be treated as a minor digital-safety problem.
Children subjected to technology-facilitated sexual exploitation were around four times more likely to report suicidal thoughts or behaviours and four times more likely to report self-harm. Anxiety levels were also about 11 percentage points higher than among their peers.
These are associations identified by the research and do not mean every case directly caused those outcomes. But they underline the serious psychological distress linked with such experiences.
Once an intimate image enters digital circulation, controlling it becomes extremely difficult. Copies can be downloaded, reposted, moved into private groups or used repeatedly for intimidation.
AI makes that problem harder because a perpetrator may no longer need an original sexual image. An ordinary photograph taken from social media can potentially be manipulated into abusive content.
India Has Already Treated Such Material as a Serious Legal Issue
Although India was not included in UNICEF’s 21-country survey, the legal issue has already reached the Supreme Court.
In its September 2024 judgment in Just Rights for Children Alliance v. S. Harish, the Court examined offences involving possession, storage and distribution of child sexual abuse material under the POCSO Act and Information Technology Act. It also urged the use of terminology that recognises such material as evidence of exploitation and abuse rather than simply pornography.
That distinction matters.
Calling it Child Sexual Abuse Material, or CSAM, keeps the focus on the child who has been exploited rather than treating the content as another category of pornography.
The UNICEF report now adds another warning for regulators and technology companies: abuse is happening inside mainstream services, not only hidden corners of the internet.
UNICEF wants platforms to make safety part of product design, restrict unwanted contact with children, improve reporting systems and respond faster when abuse is detected. Governments, it said, must also update laws as AI creates new methods of producing and distributing sexualised material involving children.
For parents and schools, the figures also suggest that simply warning children not to speak to strangers online is no longer enough.
The person applying pressure may already be a friend, classmate, partner or relative.
What this means for you: Parents should keep communication open enough that a child can report unwanted messages, image requests or threats without fearing punishment. If intimate material involving a child is shared or used for blackmail, preserve evidence and report it immediately to police or the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal rather than forwarding the material further.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/policetechnology/
