UNICEF continues Thursday reported that nearly one in five Internet-using children ages 12 to 17 in 21 countries experienced technology-enabled sexual exploitation or abuse in a single year, with an estimated 20 million children experiencing at least one form of abuse. The results show a significant gap in enforcement. Less than one percent of incidents were reported to the police, social workers or helplines.
The agency’s Through Children’s Eyes report. found that more than 15 million children encountered unwanted sexual content and nine million were pressured sexual conversations or sharing sexual images, and four million had sexual images shared without their consent. Nearly 60 percent of incidents occurred with serious consequences Social media platformswhile 14 percent involved online gaming. Remarkably, 57 percent were someone the child already knew, rather than an unknown online perpetrator. More than four in ten affected children did not share their trauma with anyone, choosing instead to suffer in silence.
Previous findings from the Disrupting Harm Project had already documented similar risks for children on the Internet. The first round surveyed mainly children in 2020-2021 in 12 countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. UNICEF’s new analysis combines these results with a second round conducted in nine additional countries between 2024 and 2025, creating a 21-country data set covering about 21,000 internet-using children.
The US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) recorded 44,155 reports from Online enticementa category that includes sextortion in 2021. That number increased to 80,524 in 2022 and 186,819 in 2023. NCMEC later reported that it received an average of nearly 100 reports of financial sextortion per day in 2024.
Recent criminal prosecutions have also shown the consequences that technology-enabled sexual abuse can have multiple platforms and victims in different countries. In September 2025, a US defendant pleaded guilty to crimes related to the exploitation of at least 68 children after prosecutors said he used Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms to do so Force minors to produce sexual material. A court in Minnesota sentenced A man was sentenced to 27 years in prison in February 2025 after prosecutors said he used fake identities on Snapchat and Instagram to attack more than 60 girls in the United States and abroad.
Such behavior constitutes a violation of the existing protective regulations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Article 19 requires States to protect children from violence, exploitation and sexual abuse, while Article 34 explicitly requires preventive measures sexual exploitation and coercion to engage in illegal sexual activity. Article 16 also protects children from unlawful interference with their privacy and correspondence. In General Comment #25With the version adopted in 2021, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child made it clear that these protective measures also apply in the digital environment.
Technology-enabled sexual exploitation and abuse do not in themselves constitute a single, broadly defined crime and their application is much more nuanced. In addition to international treaties, criminal liability is also based on national laws that cover conduct such as incitement, coercion, sexual extortion, production or distribution of child sexual abuse material, and non-consensual sharing of images.
Emerging practices involving generative AI and synthetic sexual abuse material have further highlighted the differences between national legal frameworks. UNICEF therefore called on governments to update legislation and enforcement mechanisms to combat 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 Global Threat Assessment 2025 that the scale and complexity of technology-enabled sexual exploitation of children is evolving faster than existing legal, policy and technological protections.
