Every parent worries about their children online. Most of us picture a faceless predator hiding behind a screen somewhere far away. The largest global study ever undertaken on technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation has a blunt message for those parents: that mental image is not just incomplete — it points in the wrong direction.
Disrupting Harm, a collaboration between UNICEF Innocenti, ECPAT International and INTERPOL, was funded by the Safe Online initiative with a combined investment of $15 million and carried out across 25 countries. Researchers ran nationally representative household surveys with internet-using children aged 12 to 17 and their caregivers, then layered on interviews with frontline workers, police, justice professionals and survivors. The Latin American results, released through 2026, show that this form of violence is common, close to home, and rarely the work of strangers.
The numbers across Latin America
In Mexico, the report unveiled June 23 found that 1.6 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 — about one in eight teenage internet users, or 13% — went through at least one form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation in a single year. The fieldwork was conducted across 2023 and 2024. The harms ranged from unwanted sexual images and pressure into sexual chat, to demands for intimate photos, threats to leak explicit content, and AI-generated fake sexual imagery of the child. Roughly two-thirds of incidents played out entirely online, mostly on social media.
Brazil's findings, released in March, tracked a comparable scale. Nineteen percent of internet-using children aged 12 to 17 — an estimated 3 million young people — experienced at least one form of this abuse over twelve months. Unwanted sexual content was the single most common experience, reported by 14%, followed by requests to share intimate images (9%) and offers of money or gifts in exchange for sexual images (5%). The risk climbed steeply with age: up to 29% of 17-year-olds reported abuse, against 10% of 12-year-olds.
In Colombia, roughly 860,000 adolescents — 21% of internet users aged 12 to 17 — were exploited or abused online in 2024 alone. The gaps between groups were sharp: a quarter of girls reported victimization versus 17% of boys, and 29% of children in poorer rural areas reported abuse, compared with 17% in cities.
Who is actually committing these crimes
This is where the research forces an uncomfortable conversation. In Colombia, survey data from the Disrupting Harm report shows that about half of all reported cases were carried out by someone the child already knew — a friend, a romantic interest, or a family member — while strangers accounted for only 21%, roughly one in five. Family members alone featured in 22% of cases. In Mexico, 64% of victims named an offender from their own circle. Frontline professionals interviewed for the research push back hard on the predator-in-the-shadows stereotype, describing offenders not as distant figures but as people embedded in the very settings meant to keep children safe — homes, families and schools.
In Colombia, 17% of cases involved another child or adolescent as the perpetrator — peers who, the report's interviews suggest, had in some cases been victimized themselves before being drawn into harming others. The study also documents how Colombia's webcam-studio industry and sex tourism feed exploitation, taking root as pseudo-economic "opportunities" where legitimate ones are scarce. The report frames these young offenders less as villains than as proof of how exploitation reproduces itself through vulnerability.
In Brazil, offenders leaned on economic hardship to coerce children in lower-income households, dangling money or gifts. The report notes that some children came to view trading sexual content as a way to gain a sliver of financial independence — a perception that exists, it stresses, only because adults deliberately exploit children's circumstances and the inequalities around them.
The picture in the United States
Disrupting Harm did not cover the United States, but data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) points the same way. In 2025, NCMEC's CyberTipline logged 21.3 million reports containing more than 61.8 million images, videos and files tied to suspected child sexual exploitation. Reports of online enticement rose 158% over 2024, and child sex trafficking reports jumped 323% — though NCMEC cautions that both spikes were substantially amplified by the 2024 REPORT Act, which for the first time required platforms to report those categories, so the increases reflect expanded reporting as much as rising crime.
The center received an average of 137 financial-sextortion reports a day in 2025, up 37% year over year, and says it is aware of at least three dozen teenage boys in the U.S. who have died by suicide since 2021 after being targeted by this crime. The NCMEC figures aren't methodologically comparable to the Disrupting Harm surveys, but they reinforce the same conclusion: on both sides of the border, children are not safe by default.
What the silence costs
In every country studied, most children told no one. In Mexico, victims described shame, self-blame and a sense of exposure that lingered long after the abuse itself. Disrupting Harm's data links this kind of victimization to higher rates of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression, sleep problems and substance use — in Brazil, affected children were found to be more than five times as likely to self-harm. Yet survivors routinely hit walls when seeking help, including professionals who blame them rather than support them.
When children do speak up, they tend to turn first to a mother, a sibling or a close friend. That trust, where it exists, is the strongest protection available — and it isn't built in a crisis. It's built slowly, through ordinary conversations that happen before anything goes wrong.
What families can do
The most consistent recommendation across the findings is not surveillance — it's presence. Checking privacy settings on Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and gaming platforms helps. Knowing which apps a teenager actually uses helps. But none of it replaces a relationship in which a child believes they'll be heard, not punished, if they come forward.
That responsibility doesn't rest on one parent. It belongs to every adult in a child's orbit — fathers, mothers, grandparents, older siblings. The data does not describe a crisis happening to other people's children in faraway places. It describes one unfolding in the same apps, the same platforms and the same trusted circles that families everywhere navigate daily.
In the United States, reports can be filed at cybertipline.org; young people in crisis can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. In Mexico, the Consejo Ciudadano runs a 24/7 support line, and UNICEF México and ECPAT México offer guidance for families and professionals. Colombia and Brazil's national helplines and child-protection contacts are listed in the country reports at safeonline.global.
This article discusses child sexual abuse and suicide. If you or someone you know is affected, support is available through the resources above.
