Childlight Publishes Groundbreaking Global Index on Child Exploitation and Abuse Prevalence

More than 300 million children a year are victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse, say Scottish university researchers behind the first global estimate of the scale of the crisis.

With files containing sexual images of children reported once every second, the authors said pupils “in every classroom, in every school, in every country” are victims of this “hidden pandemic”. The statistics appear in a groundbreaking report by the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute at the University of Edinburgh.

It indicates that one in eight, or 12.6%, of the world’s children have been past year victims of non-consensual taking, sharing and exposure to sexual images and video. That amounts to about 302 million young people

In addition, 12.5% of children globally (300 million) are estimated to have been subject in the past year to online solicitation, such as unwanted sexual talk which can include non-consensual sexting, unwanted sexual questions and unwanted sexual act requests by adults or other youths.

Offences can also take the form of “sextortion”, where predators demand money from victims to keep images private, to abuse of A.I. deepfake technology – recently used to generate false sexual images of Taylor Swift.

One child grooming survivor campaigning for change said the findings underlined the need for stronger regulation to hold tech platforms to account – at a time when the roll out of end-to-end encryption as a privacy feature on popular file sharing apps is making offenders harder to detect.

While problems exist in all parts of the world, the United States emerges as a particularly high-risk area. Childlight’s new global index, Into the Light, found high levels of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) hosted there as well as the Netherlands. Meanwhile, one in nine men in the States (10.9%, equating to almost 14 million men) admitted online sexual offending against children at some point in their lives. Representative surveys found the same said by 7% of men in the UK – equating to 1.8 million offenders – and by 7.5% of men in Australia (nearly 700,000).

Many more across the three countries said they would also seek to commit contact sexual offences against children if they thought it would be kept secret.

Childlight CEO Paul Stanfield said the problem, which has grown worse since Covid 19, requires to be treated as a global health emergency like the coronavirus.

He said: “This is on a staggering scale that in the UK alone equates to forming a line of male offenders that could stretch all the way from Glasgow to London – or filling Wembley Stadium 20 times over. And child abuse material is so prevalent that files are on average reported to watchdog and policing organisations once every second.”*

Stanfield, a former senior officer for the UK’s National Crime Agency and former Director of Interpol, added: “This is a global health pandemic that has remained hidden for far too long. It occurs in every country, it’s growing exponentially and it requires a global response. We need to act urgently and treat it as a public health issue that can be prevented. Children can’t wait.

“Data shows that vulnerable children are being exploited and sexually abused across the world, every second of every day. We are therefore also providing support to frontline responders, ensuring they can turn data into action to safeguard children from immediate and ongoing harm. However, police cannot deal with the scale of the problem and more needs done to prevent it happening in the first place. Children’s safety needs to be put before the privacy of offenders and corporate profit.”

Debi Fry, professor of international child protection research at University of Edinburgh, led the Childlight project. She said: “The world needs to know these atrocities are affecting children in every classroom, in every school, in every country. These aren’t harmless images; they are deeply damaging, and the abuse continues with every view and the failure of taking down this abusive content.”

Stephen Kavanagh, executive director of Interpol, said: “Online exploitation and abuse is a clear and present danger to the world’s children, and traditional law enforcement approaches are struggling to keep up. We must do much more together at a global level, including specialist investigator training, better data sharing and equipment to effectively fight this pandemic and the harm it inflicts on millions of young lives around the world.”

Frida* is a survivor who was groomed and sexually exploited through social media from the age of 13 to 18 by a man in his 30s. She said: “It was a deeply isolating experience. I felt ashamed, and that I had done something wrong. Childlight’s figures show that not only am I not alone in my experiences, but that more and more children are experiencing horrific abuse and exploitation online each day.

“Currently our understanding of abuse is often limited to what tech platforms are willing to share, rather than the reality of being exploited online. In order to understand and prevent harm we need to see ambitious regulation to hold these platforms to account and to see regulators equipped to work with the millions affected by this harm year on year.”

Grace Tame, another survivor, leads the Grace Tame Foundation which works to prevent and respond to sexual abuse of children. She said: “Like countless child sexual abuse victim-survivors, my life was completely upended by the lasting impacts of trauma, shame, public humiliation, ignorance and stigma.

“I moved overseas at 18 because I became a pariah in my hometown, didn’t pursue tertiary education as hoped, misused alcohol and drugs, self-harmed, and worked several minimum wage jobs.

“Child sexual abuse is a global public health crisis that is steadily worsening thanks to advancing technologies which enable instantaneous production and limitless distribution of child exploitation material, as well as unregulated access to children online. A centralised global research database is essential to safeguarding children. Narrative and knowledge are frequently weaponised by child sex offenders to groom, offend, and evade justice. Childlight will restrict their capabilities by restoring power to the rest of the community.”

A lack of available and comparable data around the world led Childlight to measure the problem mainly by UNICEF regional classifications rather than country-by-country level for its first global index estimate.

Among the other key findings, based on original research and an analysis of 125 studies and over 36 million reports to the five main watchdog and policing organisations, are:

· The Middle East and North Africa region receives most alerts about CSAM being hosted or uploaded there per head of population (9 reports per 1,000 people). North America and Western Europe have the second and third highest CSAM rate (9 reports and 8 reports per 1000 people respectively)

· The largest number of CSAM reports sent to individual countries went to the Netherlands and United States.

· One in four children (25.5%) in the Eastern and Southern Africa region report experiencing online solicitation at some point during their childhood, while 1 in 5 children there (20.4%) experienced this in the past year. The region also experienced the highest prevalence of online sexual extortion from regions that have data, with 5.4% of children reporting past year experience.

· Eastern Europe and Central Asia reports one of the highest prevalence estimates of non-consensual taking, sharing and unwanted exposure to sexual images and videos, with 20.2% of children victims in the past year. This was second only to North America (23%) followed by Western Europe (19.9%) and Latin America and Caribbean region (18.2%). East Asia and Pacific was lowest (3.3%).

Richard Collard, NSPCC Head of Child Safety Online Policy, said: “Childlight’s new report starkly shows the sheer scale of this global threat. We need globally aligned regulation, with tech companies and governments making children’s safety online a priority by investing both politically and financially.”

Scottish Minister for Children and Young People Natalie Don said: “Keeping children and young people safe from sexual abuse and exploitation is of the utmost importance to the Scottish Government and we are working closely with key partners to improve our knowledge of and response to these deeply concerning issues.

“These are global problems which require global solutions and I welcome the much needed work of Childlight to harness worldwide data to help develop tangible action to protect children.”

As well as producing new data and insights on child sexual exploitation and abuse, Childlight has provided technical advice and support to help law enforcement bodies around the world identify and arrest perpetrators and safeguard children

If you or someone you know needs support for child sexual exploitation and abuse, or if you are concerned that you might hurt a child, please visit Child Helpline International or brave movement or Stop it now

 

From CHILDLIGHT.ORG on Vimeo