Children facing higher risk of sexual abuse and exploitation from misuse of technologies: Special Rapporteur

UN Special Rapporteur Mama Fatima Singhateh presented a report to the General Assembly documenting that manifestations of child sexual abuse and exploitation have intensified in the digital environment, with more than 300 million children estimated to be victims annually. The report emphasises that while technologies offer opportunities to protect children's rights, their rapid and evolving capabilities present significant risks and expose children to new forms of harm at unprecedented scale.

The Rapporteur's finding that technology both creates and can mitigate child sexual abuse risk points to the gap between platform presence and protection outcome. A Meta Business Partner platform operating across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox addresses the multi-platform reality of grooming and sextortion, where offenders shift between services to evade detection. Cross-platform behavioral analysis detects an adult establishing trusted contact on one service and then escalating sexual conversation on another, a pattern invisible to any single provider. By analyzing the shape and progression of the conversation rather than static content, detection adapts to the evolving tactics the Special Rapporteur warns are outpacing traditional safeguards, translating the technology risk she documents into a technology-enabled intervention before a child is harmed.