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.
