Europol's 2026 Threat Assessment on Online Child Sexual Exploitation reports a forty-three percent year-on-year increase in referrals relating to livestreamed abuse, with investigators identifying encrypted messaging applications and private video-sharing platforms as the primary environments in which offenders now solicit, coordinate and distribute live abuse material. The assessment, compiled from data submitted by European Union member state law enforcement agencies and partner organisations including the United States National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, highlights that end-to-end encryption inhibits both automated detection and lawful-access investigative techniques, that offenders increasingly operate in closed networks with multi-layered vetting, and that victims are typically identified only after abuse has been reported by a third party or disclosed by the child, often months or years after the first incident.
Encryption protects privacy; targeted detection protects the child without breaking the encryption. Guardii operates at the client side on a young person's device or within an institutional monitoring framework, analysing message content for grooming escalation, sextortion demands, CSAM sharing and solicitation patterns before encryption is applied or after it is lifted for the recipient, and flagging high-risk exchanges to a parent, school or safeguarding professional in real time. The system identifies threat behaviour rather than reading every conversation, enabling lawful adult supervision and emergency escalation to police or child-protection services without requiring platform-level backdoors, closing the detection gap Europol has identified while preserving the confidentiality of benign communication.
