Tech Companies Must Do More to Stem the Tide of Online Child Sexual Abuse

Tech companies must do more to stem the tide of online child sexual abuse says Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. Shutterstock It might be difficult for most of us to confront, but the world is facing an unprecedented explosion in online child sexual exploitation and abuse, and it’s getting worse with every passing day.   You only need to flip through the latest report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the US’s centralized reporting system for the online exploitation of children, to be confronted by the problem. In 2022, NCMEC received 32 million reports of child sexual exploitation and abuse, including 49.4 million images and 37.7 million videos from tech companies.  While these numbers are dreadful, we also know they are the just the tip of a very large iceberg and fail to tell the full story when it comes to the true scale and scope of the issue. For example, Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – made around 27 million reports of child sexual exploitation and abuse material to NCMEC in 2022. By contrast, Apple, with its billions of handsets and iPads all connected to iCloud, reported just 234.    Something is seriously wrong with this picture. We must remind ourselves that behind these millions of images and videos are innocent children.   A significant recent study, the Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) found that an astounding 28.5 percent of Australians had experienced sexual abuse before the age of 18. The damage to children doesn’t just…Tech Companies Must Do More to Stem the Tide of Online Child Sexual Abuse