But what may begin as a private exchange can become a means of abuse. Private images are shared further, sometimes widely, sometimes within peer networks, and often without warning. A 17-year-old girl from Mexico described how she initially shared sexual images with a friend consensually, only to later discover that the images had been distributed to other peers through Telegram without her knowledge: An estimated 4 million children had someone else share sexual images of them without permission in the span of one year. “I trusted him a lot, and everything was fine. At one point, he started asking me for pictures, and I trusted him, so I sent them to him. Then I realized he was resharing the pictures.” Having sexual content circulated among peers or in public can cause serious harm, but young people also spoke about the emotional impact of broken trust and loss of control. Many described carrying intense feelings of shame and self-blame, even in situations where others had clearly violated their trust. A young woman from Serbia expressed in the interview that she felt it was “my fault in some way” that her private images were shared with others online. When asked what she meant, she responded: “So, he asked me for those pictures and I, I just sent them to him. It was so, like … easy … and when I think for example today, what I have done, you know, I literally can’t, can’t believe it. I feel a bit ashamed to talk about it, to tell you the truth.” In other cases, images are created or taken without consent in the first place, then circulated later. The harm is not contained in a single moment – it can resurface repeatedly as content is shared with different people and across spaces. A young woman from Brazil recalls continuously surveilling social media, looking for a sexual image portraying her: “I remember that every week I would look on Twitter and Instagram for things that had been leaked, nudes of people. I even looked on Google images to see if there were any of me, but thank God, I didn’t find any. I remember I spent years and years looking, and I never found it, but I also don’t know what he did with that photo. I can’t imagine he deleted it.” Through Children’s Eyes How does digital technology enable sexual exploitation and abuse? 16