The Childlight Global Child Safety Institute has published its second Into the Light Index on Global Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA).  Last year’s inaugural publication delivered a shock to the world with global data pointing to more than 300 million children affected annually by technology-facilitated CSEA. The number was haunting, it rightly drew global attention and it helped to catalyse change.

The latest findings are no less troubling than before.

• Approximately 1 in 15 children report experiencing rape or sexual assault before the age of 18, based on 48 studies from 19 countries across Western Europe. This is equivalent to around five million children.
• In South Asia, where we found representative survey data in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, around 1 in 8 children report such abuse before the age of 18. That would equate to about 54 million children in those three countries alone.
• Technology-facilitated abuse remains widespread and the deliberate commercially led choices of major technology companies, such as rolling out end-to-end encryption without safeguards, are making it harder to detect and stop.
• In the Netherlands alone, the scale of CSAM is so vast that it accounts for more than 60% of all material hosted in Western Europe.

At Childlight, we continue to insist that this global pandemic of CSEA must be understood, and addressed, as a public health emergency. Just as the world mobilised against HIV/AIDS, Covid-19 and smallpox, so too must we mobilise against CSEA. With the right interventions, the right regulation, and the right will, millions of children can be protected.  Support for prevention is growing globally, with 30 governments pledging new actions in the past year alone, and together we can and must urgently shift the dial. Because children can’t wait.