UNICEF on Thursday reported that nearly one in five internet-using children aged 12 to 17 across 21 countries experienced technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse within a single year, with an estimated 20 million children subjected to at least one form of abuse. The findings expose a substantial enforcement gap fewer than one percent of the experiences were reported to police, social workers or helplines.
The agency’s Through Children’s Eyes report found that more than 15 million children encountered unwanted sexual content, nine million were pressured into sexual conversations or sharing sexual images, and four million had sexual images distributed without their consent. Nearly 60 percent of incidents occurred through major social media platforms, while 14 percent involved online games. Notably, 57 percent involved someone the child already knew rather than an unknown online offender. More than four in ten affected children did not share their trauma with anyone else, choosing instead to suffer in silence.
Earlier findings from the Disrupting Harm project had already documented similar risks to children online. Its first round surveyed children primarily during 2020-2021 across 12 countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. UNICEF’s new analysis combines those findings with a second round conducted during 2024-2025 in nine additional countries, creating a 21-country dataset covering approximately 21,000 internet-using children.
The U.S. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) recorded 44,155 reports of online enticement, a category that includes sextortion in 2021. That figure rose to 80,524 in 2022 and 186,819 in 2023. NCMEC later reported that in 2024 it received nearly 100 reports of financial sextortion per day on average.
Recent prosecutions have also shown how technology-facilitated sexual abuse can involve multiple platforms and victims across different countries. In September 2025, a US defendant pleaded guilty to offences arising from the exploitation of at least 68 children after prosecutors said he used Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms to coerce minors into producing sexual material. A Minnesota court sentenced a man to 27 years in prison in February 2025 after prosecutors said he used false identities on Snapchat and Instagram to target more than 60 girls in the United States and abroad.
Such conduct exists in contravention of existing protections under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Article 19 requires states to protect children from violence, exploitation and sexual abuse, while Article 34 specifically requires measures to prevent sexual exploitation and coercion into unlawful sexual activity. Article 16 also protects children from unlawful interference with their privacy and correspondence. In General Comment No. 25, adopted in 2021, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child clarified that these protections also applied in the digital environment.
Technology-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse is not in itself a single universally defined criminal offence, and its application is much more nuanced. In addition to international treaties, criminal liability relies as well on domestic laws covering conduct such as grooming, coercion, sexual extortion, production or distribution of child sexual-abuse material and non-consensual image sharing.
Emerging practices involving generative AI and synthetic sexual-abuse material have further exposed differences between national legal frameworks. UNICEF consequently urged governments to update legislation and enforcement mechanisms to address sexual extortion and AI-generated abusive material.
UNICEF’s warning is consistent with broader assessments of the problem. The WeProtect Global Alliance concluded in its 2025 Global Threat Assessment that the scale and sophistication of technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation were developing faster than existing legal, policy and technological safeguards.
