New report names the country hosting most of Europe’s Child Sexual Abuse Material

New research has identified that a single country – the Netherlands – is responsible for hosting more than 60% of all online Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in Western Europe, fuelling an emergency that devastates the lives of millions of children globally.

A new report from the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute, based at the University of Edinburgh, finds that the country is also a massive host in global terms – responsible for 30% of the world’s total on its data infrastructure. Particularly high levels are also found in Lithuania, Slovakia and Luxembourg.

The report is being launched in Vilnius at the annual congress of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse & Neglect (ISPCAN).

Far from being a domestic issue, the scale of CSAM hosted by servers and reported within the Netherlands in particular has far-reaching consequences, enabling criminal networks and fuelling demand for new abuse.

Childlight says it also undermines the child protection efforts of European countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and France which have invested significantly in detection, takedown and law enforcement.

While those nations move swiftly to remove harmful content, material left online within the Netherlands continues to be distributed, weakening continental enforcement as a whole, despite efforts by Dutch authorities to tackle the problem.

The institute and Dutch child protection NGO Terre des Hommes Netherlands are urging political parties contesting the upcoming Dutch general election to commit to strong, enforceable action to confront the crisis.

Child sexual abuse material is shared and distributed online, creating a global problem with removal. But it requires a physical hosting location which means there is a way to find and remove it from websites and forums. Much of this is hosted on computers based in the Netherlands.

Data from INHOPE, which records instances of such content appearing, saw cases of CSAM hosted in the Netherlands rise from 238,578 in 2023 to 1,332,792 in 2024. The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with which tech companies are required to log evidence of CSAM, reported a rise in Netherlands cases from 72,913 in 2023 to 273,046 in 2024.

Childlight’s Into the Light report produces a CSAM availability rate, based on these two sources on hosting and reports. The rate for the Netherlands is by far highest in Western Europe at 880.9 cases per 10,000 people for 2024, up from 172.1 the previous year. It was followed by Slovakia on 193.7, Lithuania on 190 and Luxembourg on 186.3. The UK has the 12th highest rate of 34 Western European countries at 41.8 (up from 27.2), and the lowest is San Marino on 5.4 while the Western European average for 2024 is 71.7.

It warns that children across Europe and around the world are suffering as a result of this availability of CSAM at scale and that robust legislation and enforcement there could significantly reduce the volume of abuse material online globally.

“What happens in the Netherlands is not staying in the Netherlands,” said Childlight CEO Paul Stanfield. “Dutch data infrastructure is being used to spread images of child abuse worldwide – including abuse of children in other countries. Every day this material stays online, children are re-victimised, and abusers are emboldened. This is preventable and we need urgent political will to stop it.”

Terre des Hommes underline this and argue the latest figures show that if the Netherlands aligned with the Western European average, 1.5 million fewer notices of Dutch-hosted CSAM material flagged by watchdogs would have been necessary in the past two years.

“These numbers are worrying and unacceptable,” says Gráinne Le Fevre, CEO of Terre des Hommes Netherlands. “We urge Dutch politicians to act quickly. Better regulations are needed to stop this scale of abuse. The time to act is now.”

Childlight’s report highlights the direct risks posed to children globally due to CSAM reporting and hosting in the Netherlands. Once CSAM is hosted there, it can be accessed almost instantly by abusers worldwide, including across Europe, further fuelling demand and re-traumatising the children whose abuse has been recorded and distributed.

Rhiannon-Faye McDonald was abused at the age of 13 after being approached online by a perpetrator posing as a teenager. Soon afterwards he turned up at her home and abused her in person. Today she campaigns for better online safety through the UK-based Marie Collins Foundation.

She said: “For most victims and survivors, even with the right support, the impacts are significant and long-lasting. We live with misplaced self-blame and the fear of being recognised by those who have seen the images or videos of our abuse. For anybody who believes that it’s “just a photo”, this couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Childlight said several factors may underpin the Dutch problem and that more research is needed to identify root causes, including the country’s role as a global hub for data centres and internet exchange points, the scale and openness of its hosting market, and potential differences in hosting business models or takedown procedures.

Legal and regulatory frameworks may also shape both the speed of content removal and the visibility of CSAM in monitoring data, while strong detection partnerships could amplify reporting compared to countries with weaker monitoring capacity. However, there are signs of change. In 2022, the Dutch government introduced reforms to strengthen criminal investigations into CSAM, and law enforcement agencies have begun increasing takedown capacity.

At the EU level, proposed regulation – including the EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation – seeks to require tech companies to proactively detect, report, and remove CSAM. If passed, this would compel the Netherlands and other member states to take a more interventionist approach to content monitoring, potentially closing long-standing loopholes in digital hosting laws.

Childlight and Terre des Hommes urge the new Dutch government to tackle the problem as a priority, support law enforcement responses to rapidly identify and remove CSAM, identify and safeguard victims, and bring perpetrators to justice.