Sexual Exploitation & Abuse/Child PornSexual Predators/

Exploitation/Child Pornography

(older archives available here)

*Sexual Predation & Exploitation/Abuse
*Child Pornography

Sexual Predation & Exploitation/Child Pornography

  • Tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused — more than double what they found the previous year.
  1. In 1998, there were over 3,000 reports of child sexual abuse imagery.
  2. Just over a decade later, yearly reports soared past 100,000.
  3. In 2014, that number surpassed 1 million for the first time.
  4. Last year, there were 18.4 million, more than one-third of the total ever reported.
  5. Despite landmark legislation past in 2008 to reign in the scourge (which has gone largely underfunded)the explosion in detected content kept growing — exponentially. (New York Times, Sept. 30, 2019) 

  • The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) operates the CyberTipline, a national mechanism for the public and electronic service providers to report instances of suspected child sexual exploitation. In 2018 the CyberTipline received more than 18.4 million reports, most of which related to:

    (1) Apparent child sexual abuse images. (2) Online enticement, including “sextortion.” (3) Child sex trafficking. (4) Child sexual molestation.

    Since its inception, the CyberTipline has received more than 45 million reports.

    To further NCMEC’s mission and help reduce proliferation, NCMEC has sent more than 271,000 notifications to electronic service providers regarding publicly accessible websites (URLs) on which suspected child sexual abuse images appeared.

    NCMEC’s Child Victim Identification Program, which helps to locate and rescue child victims in abusive images, has reviewed more than 273 million images and videos and law enforcement has identified more than 16,700 child victims. (Source: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Exploited Children Statistics. Accessed May 3, 2019)

  • Children 10 years old and younger account for 22 percent of all online obscene-content consumption in the 18-years-old-and-under category.

  • The annual number of persons prosecuted for commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) cases filed in U.S. district court nearly doubled between 2004 and 2013, increasing from 1,405 to 2,776 cases.

    Suspects referred for the possession of child pornography (72 percent) accounted for the majority of all CSEC suspects, followed by those suspected of child sex trafficking (18 percent) and child pornography production (10 percent). Most suspects arrested for CSEC crimes were male (97 percent), were U.S. citizens (97 percent), were white (82 percent), had no prior felony convictions (79 percent) and were not married (70 percent). CSEC suspects had a median age of 39 years, and more than half (56 percent) had no more than a high school education. (Department of Justice, Oct. 2017)

  • 67% of Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) survivors said the distribution of their images impacts them differently than the hands-on abuse they suffered because the distribution never ends and the images are permanent. (Canadian Centre for Child Protection, 2017)

  • Child pornography offences have exploded by more than 200 per cent in the last decade, a trend that advocates say is fueled by the easy spread of illicit material over the internet. Incidents of child pornography climbed for the eighth year in a row in 2016. The agency recorded 6,245 incidents last year, up from 4,380 in 2015. That represents a more than 40 per cent rate increase in just one year, and a 233 percent spike from the rate reported in 2006 (Statistics Canada, July 2017)

  • A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in the United States. (Center for Court Innovation, 2016)

  • 92% of all child sexual abuse URLs we identified globally in 2016 were hosted in these five countries: Netherlands, UNITED STATES, Canada, France & Russia. (U.S. was ranked 2nd). https://annualreport.iwf.org.uk/assets/pdf/iwf_report_2016.pdf

  • The Canadian Centre for Child Protection found that children under 12 years old were depicted in 78.30% of the images and videos assessed by their team, and 63.40% of those children were under 8 years of age. Among that same material, they found that 80.42% of the children were girls, while 19.58% were boys.

  • 42% of sextortion victims met their abuser online Thorn. (2015) Child Pornography Statistics. Thorn. [Online] [Accessed 29th December 2015] https://www.wearethorn.org/child-pornography-and-abuse-statistics/
  • Internet Safety is now the 4th top ranked issue in the list of health concerns for U.S. children. C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital (2015) Sexting and internet safety climb top 10 list of health concerns for children across the U.S. National Poll on Children’s Health, University of Michigan [Online] [Accessed 29th December 2015] http://www.mottchildren.org/news/archive/201508/sexting

  • This year, one in 10 children under the age of 18 will be sexually abused in the United States.
    Source: http://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/PREVALENCE-RATE-WHITE-PAPER-D2L.pdf (2013)

  • The "4 every girl campaign" found that underage female characters on primetime television are more likely to be presented in sexual scenes than adult women (Parent's Television Council, 2013)
  • Pornography and stripping were two forms of exploitation most likely to be written into scripts as punchy lines (Parent's Television Council, 2013)
  • There are over 747,408 registered sex offenders in the United States, and over 100,000 are lost in the system (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 2012)

Child Pornography

  • More than 30% of the searches conducted in eDonkey P2P network are related to child sexual abuse. Thorn. (2015) Child Pornography Statistics. Thorn. [Online] [Accessed 29th December 2015] https://www.wearethorn.org/child-pornography-and-abuse-statistics/
  • As of December 2012, NCMEC's child victim identification program has reviewed and analyzed more than 80 million child pornography images since it was created in 2002. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2012)
  • There has been a 774% increase in the number of child pornography images and videos reviewed through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Child Victim Identification Program (1.98 million images/videos) to 2011 (17.3 million images/videos). (NCMEC data illustrate the explosion. Child Victim Identification Program (CVIP), 2005- reviewed 1.98 million child pornography images and videos. 2008 – 8.6 million, a four-fold increase in three years. 2010 – 13.6 million, 2011 – 17.3 million.)