AI- and non-AI online child sexual victimisation, disclosures and help-seeking: A national study of Australian adolescents

Key Findings

• — Before age 18, 6.4% had a sexual image shared without consent and 11.3% were sexually solicited online by an adult; girls reported higher rates of both (+2.5 and +6.8 percentage points)
• — AI was involved in 26.0% of non-consensual image-sharing cases and 8.6% of adult-solicitation cases (14.9% of online sexual victimisation overall); boys were more likely than girls to report AI involvement (37.5% vs 19.7%)
• — 65.7% of victims disclosed to someone; 18.7% disclosed to an AI against 13.2% to any authority (teacher, doctor, counsellor, police, helpline or reporting portal); boys disclosed to AI at 27.1% vs girls 14.6%; among those who disclosed to an AI only 18.9% also told a human, and 35.4% of victims told no one or only an AI
• — Lifetime AI use under 18 was 80.6% (56.1% chatting with an AI, 45.1% generating images, 6.5% AI embedded in social platforms, 1.7% generating pornographic content); 36.6% had asked an AI for personal life advice; 19.0% of boys and 15.4% of girls used AI for help-seeking at least weekly
• — 22.8% knew a friend who had experienced online sexual victimisation (28.6% personal or peer experience combined); 33.9% were at least moderately worried about AI being used to create fake images of them (girls 38.5%, boys 29.7%)

Methodology Notes

Cross-sectional online panel survey with proportional quota sampling and post-stratification weighting by age, sex and location; final analytic sample n=1,894 aged 16 to 18 reporting on experiences before age 18; fieldwork March to April 2026 (month precision); victimisation items adapted from the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire R2 (ACMS version); disclosure to AI captured separately from AI-enabled reporting portals; 95% confidence intervals reported throughout; limitations stated (retrospective self-report; gender-diverse subsample too small to disaggregate). Report page dated 6 July 2026; PDF 58 pp, created 5 July 2026, uploaded August 2026; DOI 10.25909/32902481; companion papers: 'Prevalence and disclosure of AI and non-AI online child sexual victimisation' (SSRN 10.2139/ssrn.7000199, full data tables) and 'The digital lives of adolescents' (10.25909/32904020).

Sources