A survey of 21,000 internet-using children aged 12 to 17 across 21 countries finds almost one in five experienced tech-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse
More than half of abuse occurred on mainstream social media platforms; less than 1 per cent of all experiences were reported to authorities, new report finds
Context & Ripple Effects
The findings extend a 2021 study in which US minors reported abuse, harassment and sexual solicitation from adults on technology platforms, while a separate 2021 assessment of expanding child-abuse material documented how offenders were exploiting technology blind spots. UNICEF adds cross-country evidence from children themselves rather than a single-market snapshot.
The survey concentrates the operational problem on mainstream social platforms, where more than half of reported abuse occurred, while reporting to authorities covered less than 1% of experiences. That gap makes platform-level detection and accessible reporting channels central to the response, not merely downstream enforcement.
First-order effects
- Mainstream social-media platforms face evidence that they are the leading venue in the survey’s reported abuse experiences, increasing the urgency of safeguards aimed at child users.
- Authorities receive reports for under 1% of surveyed experiences, leaving enforcement with a sharply incomplete view of the harm children describe.
Second-order effects
- Platform safety teams and product owners are pushed to make in-product reporting and escalation more usable, because failures at that step limit the cases that can reach authorities.
- The result shifts attention from hosting alone—highlighted by the 2024 concentration of abuse webpages in EU-hosted infrastructure—to the social-platform interactions through which abuse is experienced.
Third-order effects
- If similar measurement continues to show high exposure and minimal official reporting, child-safety policy will increasingly assess platforms on prevention and reporting pathways, not only on material removed after detection.
- The sector’s child-safety challenge is becoming an end-to-end trust-and-safety problem: protecting minors in mainstream services while connecting credible reports to enforcement.
The trend: Child online-safety scrutiny is moving from the existence of illegal material toward whether mainstream platforms prevent abuse and convert children’s experiences into actionable reports.