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Create environments where children can speak without fear. Many children remain silent because they fear blame, punishment, shame, or losing access to technology. • Support parents, caregivers, teachers and other adults to create ongoing, open channels of communication with children. Trust is built through everyday conversations, not only discussions about risk or abuse. Strong, non-judgmental relationships help children feel safe seeking help and enable earlier recognition of harm before a child is able to identify or disclose it themselves. • Support schools, families and communities to effectively respond when children disclose abuse, rather than react with judgement or restriction. This includes training parents, teachers and frontline professionals to respond calmly, empathetically and without victimblaming attitudes. • Provide culturally informed and age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality and relationship education to help children understand consent, coercion, boundaries and healthy relationships, both in person and online. Ensure platforms are designed for child safety, not maximum engagement. While platform safety tools and digital skills are important, children should not be required to navigate complex privacy settings, identify dangerous interactions, or repeatedly report abuse to stay safe. • Regulate platforms to enforce safety-by-design standards, including privacy-by-default settings for children, stronger restrictions on unsolicited contacts, effective moderation systems and rapid removal of abusive content. This includes guardrails for AI-powered tools so that these cannot be used to generate sexual content depicting children or to facilitate the sexual abuse of children in other ways. • Ensure recommender algorithms do not promote harmful content to children, especially content that might desensitize them to sexual abuse, nor share children’s contact details or profiles with unknown adult users. Regular child rights impact assessments should be conducted. Through Children’s Eyes Recommendations 40

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

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English

Topic

Digital Rights
Digital Surveillance

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UNICEF

Date Published: Sep 2, 2026

Abstract: Across 21 countries, an estimated 20 million children aged 12 to 17 – about 1 in 5 of the internet-using children in these countries – were sexually exploited or abused through digital technologies in a single year. They were targeted on digital platforms they used every day, sometimes by someone they already knew, and sometimes by someone they first met online. Many of these children did not seek help: 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. The associations are deeply concerning, and these profound impacts can extend well beyond the immediate incident, affecting children’s schooling, relationships and everyday lives

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Through Children's Eyes How Digital Technologies Enable Child Sexual Abuse - UNICEF.pdf.pdf
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Myanmar Internet Project

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

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