Snapshot of AI Usage and Concerns Among Children and Parents: Insights from 10 countries

Key Findings

• — Up to 50% of surveyed children are already using AI, with one in ten turning to it for advice about things that worry them; uptake is substantial but uneven across countries
• — Children are over three times more likely to be users of AI systems than their parents or caregivers
• — A third of children reported concerns about AI being used to scam, trick, or spread misinformation; a quarter feared having their images or videos manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes
• — Cites UNICEF estimates that AI was used to create fake sexual images or videos of at least 1.2 million children across 11 surveyed countries within one year

Methodology Notes

Issue brief (English PDF, 321 KB) drawing on survey data from Disrupting Harm Phase 2, a research project led by UNICEF's Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innocenti, ECPAT International, and INTERPOL, funded by Safe Online. Suggested citation reads 'UNICEF Innocenti, Florence, June 2026'; exact day not stated, so dated 2026-06-01 with month-only precision. unicef.org blocks automated fetchers (including the Internet Archive crawler on the PDF itself); verified from the publisher's own landing page via a 2026-06-30 Wayback snapshot carrying the key takeaways and suggested citation. The full PDF was not read.

Sources