Online child abuse is a unique form of child abuse that is committed, facilitated, or amplified through digital technologies, including the internet, mobile devices, online games, and social media platforms. It includes conduct from cyberbullying and online harassment as well as coercion to self-harm, grooming, sexual extortion, the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and the live-streaming of contact sexual abuse. Such abuse may not happen face-to-face, nor does it necessarily require physical contact, but may overlap into real-world offline harm. The scale of online child abuse has grown substantially alongside internet access.
Forms of online child abuse
Online harassment and cyberbullying Cyberbullying is the repeated use of digital platforms to threaten, humiliate, or socially exclude another child. Unlike traditional bullying, it can follow a child home and persist around the clock, and material can be screenshotted, reshared, and resurfaced long after the original incident. The 2021/2022 WHO Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study, surveying more than 279,000 adolescents across 44 countries in Europe, Central Asia, and Canada, found that around one in six had experienced cyberbullying, with rates rising between 2018 and 2022. Targeted harassment of an individual child, including doxxing, coordinated abuse by multiple people, and identity-based attacks, can take place alongside or independently of bullying.
Coercion to self-harm A distinct and growing form of online abuse involves perpetrators, sometimes operating in organized online networks, who manipulate children into self-harm, suicide, or harming others on camera. Perpetrators typically target vulnerable teens through gaming platforms, social media, and messaging apps, groom them by building up trust and a perceived relationship, then use blackmail, ideological framing, or sadistic role-play to escalate demands. The United States' FBI and the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency have issued joint warnings about networks known by names including "764" and "The Com," which they describe as deliberately seeking to traumatize youth. Canada has added 764 to its list of terrorist organizations.
Online child sexual exploitation and abuse Online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) covers conduct in which a child is sexually abused or exploited through digital means, whether the abuse is wholly online or extends into offline contact.
Grooming Grooming is the process by which an offender builds trust with a child, often through chat platforms, online games, or social media, in order to facilitate sexual abuse, the production of imagery, or in-person contact. Grooming frequently involves the solicitation of intimate images, child sexual abuse media (CSAM), in which an offender persuades or pressures a child to produce sexual images or videos of themselves; once obtained, this imagery is often used for further coercion.
Sextortion Sexual blackmail, also called sexual extortion or sextortion, is the use of threats to release intimate imagery in order to coerce a child into producing further imagery, paying money, or engaging in further sexual activity. Financially motivated sextortion of adolescent boys, in which offenders pose as peers to obtain images and then demand payment, has been identified as a rapidly growing pattern and has been linked to a number of teenage suicides.
Online-facilitated child trafficking Online platforms are used at multiple stages of child trafficking for recruiting, advertising, and logistics. Traffickers use social media, dating applications, and messaging platforms to recruit children, and advertise victims on classified sites and dark web forums. Livestreamed child sexual abuse is the real-time transmission of contact abuse over the internet, and is often arranged across borders and paid for through remittance services or cryptocurrency, with the Philippines identified as a particular hub.
Child sexual abuse material Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) refers to visual depictions of a real child engaged in sexual activity, or of a child's sexual parts for sexual purposes. CSAM may be produced by an adult during contact abuse, coerced from a child during grooming or sextortion, or self-generated by an adolescent and subsequently shared without consent. Once produced, CSAM is widely traded online, and its continued circulation can revictimize and harm the child for years after the original abuse. The scale of CSAM circulation is documented through hotline data: in 2024, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) received 20.5 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation through its CyberTipline, representing 29.2 million individual incidents and containing nearly 63 million images, videos, and other files, of which 84% resolved to activity outside the United States. In the same year, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) confirmed 291,273 webpages containing CSAM, with 62% traced to hosting services in European Union member states, and the INHOPE global hotline network processed nearly 2.5 million records of suspected CSAM traced to 86 countries. Online harassment and cyberbullying
Online harassment of children includes a range of behavior including cyberbullying, coordinated pile-ons called dogpiles, identity-based attacks, doxxing, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. Cyberbullying, the repeated use of digital platforms to harass, humiliate, or socially exclude a specific target, is the most extensively researched form. Unlike traditional bullying, it is not bounded by physical proximity or school hours: harmful content can be screenshotted, shared, and resurfaced indefinitely, and a child may be targeted simultaneously by multiple people across multiple platforms. Girls and young women are disproportionately targeted by sexual harassment and coordinated pile-ons involving large numbers of strangers simultaneously, a scale of victimization with no offline equivalent. Identity-based harassment targeting children on the basis of race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation has been documented across platforms in regions around the world, and frequently intersects with bullying and discrimination in the physical world.
Prevalence Cyber-bullying is especially prevalent among children as an extension of bullying within schools and has been documented across all world regions. A 2019 poll conducted by UNICEF and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children, drawing on responses from more than 170,000 young people aged 13-24 across 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, found that one in three reported having been a victim of online bullying, with one in five saying they had skipped school as a result; 34 per cent of respondents in sub-Saharan Africa reported online bullying victimization, a rate comparable to those recorded in other regions.
Effects Cyberbullying is associated with a range of adverse mental health outcomes. A 2024 systematic review of 32 studies involving nearly 30,000 students found that cyber-victimization was significantly associated with depression, anxiety, psychological stress, and suicidal behavior across the majority of studies examined. Children who experience cyberbullying are more likely to also experience or perpetrate bullying in physical school settings, and the combination of online and offline victimization is associated with worse outcomes than either alone.
Coercion to self-harm A distinct form of online child abuse involves people who manipulate children into self-harm or suicide through digital means. This occurs both in organized networks and in individual cases, including peer or intimate partner coercion through private messaging, a pattern that has resulted in criminal prosecutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Canada. Unlike cyberbullying between peers, coercion to self-harm is characterized by the deliberate targeting of vulnerable teens, the building of a relationship of false trust akin to grooming, and the use of blackmail, escalating psychological pressure, or ideological framing to coerce harmful acts on camera or self-destructive behavior.
This behavior has been documented in connection with organized global networks now formally categorized by the United States Department of Justice as Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE), a term that emerged in federal court filings in early 2025. The 764 network, which emerged in 2021 from the earlier CVLT network and operates primarily through Discord and Telegram, is among the most documented groupings within this ecosystem, with victims identified across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Finland, Sweden, and Canada, among other countries. Members have been documented coercing children, usually aged 8 to 17, with a focus on those from marginalized backgrounds or with existing mental health difficulties, into producing child sexual abuse material and images of self-harm, using per-victim dossiers of coerced imagery and personal information as ongoing leverage to prevent disclosure. As of December 2025, the FBI reported more than 350 active investigations connected to 764 and related nihilist violent extremist groups, with victims estimated to number in the thousands globally. Canada became the first country to designate 764 as a terrorist entity in December 2025, alongside Maniac Murder Cult and the Terrorgram Collective; the UK has prosecuted 764-linked offenders under terrorism legislation; and New Zealand and Australia have made comparable designations of associated networks.
Online child sexual exploitation and abuse
Grooming
Grooming is a method used by offenders that involves building trust with a child in order to gain access to and time alone with them, with the goal of facilitating sexual abuse, the production of CSAM, or in-person contact. When grooming occurs online it is frequently done without the knowledge of any trusted adult in the child's life. A significant proportion of online grooming is carried out by individuals already known to the child offline, including acquaintances, family friends, and trusted adults, who use the internet to strengthen that relationship for future exploitation or lie about their identity to forge a relationship. Individual groomers can be of any sex, gender, or age and often use social media platforms, chat rooms, photo-sharing apps, dating apps, or gaming sites to make initial contact with potential victims. The platforms used vary by region: in Latin America, Facebook and WhatsApp are the most commonly documented contact points, while in Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa mobile messaging applications predominate, reflecting differences in platform penetration and internet access patterns. Perpetrators actively study the vulnerabilities and needs of individual children, adapting their strategies so that the child feels like a willing participant rather than a victim.