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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Haroon Siddique and agency

More than 300m children victims of online sexual abuse every year

a woman's hands using a laptop keyboard
Campaigners have called the problem of online sexual offences against children a ‘global health pandemic’. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

More than 300 million children across the globe are victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse each year, research suggests.

In what is believed to be the first global estimate of the scale of the crisis, researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that 12.6% of the world’s children have been victims of nonconsensual talking, sharing and exposure to sexual images and video in the past year, equivalent to about 302 million young people.

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