Online & Tech-Facilitated

The Problem

The way digital spaces are designed, regulated, and governed directly shapes children’s safety. Yet many of today’s technologies were not developed with children’s rights and protection in mind. 

From social media and gaming platforms to livestreaming services and artificial intelligence, digital tools are being misused to facilitate sexual exploitation and abuse at an unprecedented scale. Perpetrators can reach children more easily than ever before. Abuse is recorded and livestreamed; with images and videos shared globally within seconds and stored indefinitely online. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is used to create synthetic child sexual abuse material. Perpetrators operate across borders, exploit encrypted and emerging technologies and take advantage of gaps between legal and regulatory systems. 

Children and caregivers should not carry the burden of navigating unsafe digital environments. Responsibility must rest with those who design, profit from, and regulate these systems. 

Our Approach 

ECPAT works to shift that responsibility of building safe digital environments for children to where it belongs: the technology industry to build platforms and products that are safe for children, and to governments to hold them accountable.  

We advocate for digital environments where children’s rights are respected by design. Our approach combines evidence, policy reform, industry engagement, cross-sector collaboration and child participation to create lasting safeguards for children, foster responsible innovation, and ensure strong accountability. We aim to move from reactive responses to systemic prevention, ensuring safety is embedded into digital ecosystems from the start. 

What We’re Doing 

Building the Evidence Base 

Tech-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse is widespread and constantly evolving. Comprehensive and up-to-date evidence is essential to understand its scope and nature, and to inform stronger policies, platform design, and responses from child protection systems. 

Through Disrupting Harm, a unique collaboration with INTERPOL and UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innnocenti, with funding from Safe Online, we’ve developed the most comprehensive research to date on technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse across 25 countries in six regions. Findings reveal that: 

• Millions of children were subjected to tech-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse in a single year
• Tech-facilitated and in-person abuse and exploitation are deeply connected
• Perpetrators are often someone the child already knows, challenging the myth of “stranger danger”
• Many children don’t know where to turn for help 

By bringing together law enforcement data, service provider insights, and the voices of children and young survivors, we support governments and national stakeholders to understand the scope and nature of harm in their national contexts.    

Learn more about Disrupting Harm. 

Elevating Children as Agents of Change 

Children are experts in their own digital lives, and their voices are essential to building digital environments that are safe, inclusive, and grounded in reality.   

We work to ensure children shape the solutions that affect them. Through child- and youth-led assessments, survivor-informed research, and global consultations with caregivers and young people, children’s insights directly inform our recommendations to governments and technology companies—from improving reporting mechanisms to addressing gendered online abuse and strengthening support pathways. 

Learn how we’re working with children to shape their digital futures. 

Driving Policy Reforms to Hold Platforms Accountable 

Digital regulation must keep pace with how tech-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse occur and hold platforms accountable to prevent harm. Through evidence-driven advocacy and coalition-building, we strengthen civil society influence to embed child rights standards in emerging digital frameworks and improve enforcement at national, regional, and global levels. 

Across Europe, we’re advocating for comprehensive legislative frameworks that require online service providers to conduct risk assessments of child sexual abuse on their services, implement effective mitigation measures, and detect, remove, and report abuse. Learn more about how we’re doing this through Project Beacon. 

Beyond Europe, evidence from our joint initiative Disrupting Harm has generated actionable policy recommendations, helping governments design reforms that reflect how abuse actually occurs in their contexts. 

At regional levels, we have provided technical support and policy guidance, contributing to dialogues within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), supporting the development and adoption of regional Guidelines for Harmonised and Comprehensive National Legislation Against All Forms of Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. 

Engaging with Industry for Safety-by-Design 

We work directly with the online gaming sector and other technology actors to embed child protection into product design. We advocate and develop safety-by-design approaches. Our work focuses on strengthening reporting tools and in-game support for timely help, developing gender-sensitive and inclusive policies that address the different ways children experience online harm and promoting youth-informed guidance and assessments to ensure children’s voices shape safe gaming environments. 

Through these efforts, we help create digital spaces where children can play, learn, and interact safely, shifting the burden of protection from children onto the platforms themselves. 

Why This Matters 

Children have the right to use digital technologies safely. If we do nothing, children will continue to be harmed in the very spaces meant for learning, connection, and play. It is not their responsibility to protect themselves from exploitation. By keeping child protection at the core of digital transformation, we equip policymakers, platforms, investigators, caregivers, and civil society with the tools to act.  

The stakes are high: children’s safety, dignity, mental health, and lifelong wellbeing. A digital world that respects children’s rights is possible—but only if protection is built into the system. 

Take Action 

A safer digital environment for children requires collective action. Together, we can build responsible digital ecosystems where children are protected, not exploited. 

• Join us in calling EU leaders to promptly adopt the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation – a law designed to protect children from technology-facilitated sexual abuse and exploitation.