Through Children's Eyes: How Digital Technologies Enable Child Sexual Abuse

Key Findings

• — Across 21 countries, an estimated 20 million children aged 12 to 17, about 1 in 5 of the internet-using children in those countries, were sexually exploited or abused through digital technologies in a single year.
• — Less than 1 per cent of cases were reported to the police, a social worker or a helpline, and more than 4 in 10 cases were disclosed to no one at all.
• — Children subjected to these forms of abuse were four times more likely to have suicidal thoughts and behaviours, four times more likely to self-harm, and reported anxiety levels around 11 percentage points higher than their peers.
• — Over 1.1 million children had AI-generated sexual images or videos created depicting them in one year, based on new questions asked in the nine second-round countries (Armenia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Serbia), with the caveat that children may be unaware of such images.
• — 57 per cent of cases involved a perpetrator already known to the child.

Methodology Notes

Round one covered about 21,000 children in 21 countries (2020 to 2022); round two about 9,000 children in nine countries with data collected 2024 to 2025, and only round two carried the AI-generated-imagery item; qualitative interviews with survivors aged up to 24 were conducted 2024 to 2025. Not a study of AI interaction: it qualifies through the deepfake and synthetic-abuse-imagery payload. The report page states a publication date of September 2026 (day not stated, so month precision; PDF created 2026-08-27). unicef.org blocks the sweep host, so the landing page and the 99-page PDF were verified from Wayback Machine captures of 2026-09-03.

Sources