Europol Report Reveals 40 Percent Increase in Online Child Sexual Abuse Material Reports in 2023
Guardii Analysis
Europol published data on 28 August 2024 showing a 40 percent year-on-year increase in reports of online child sexual abuse material received by law enforcement across the European Union in 2023, with the agency attributing the rise to improved detection by technology companies, greater public awareness, and continued growth in the volume of material circulating on both open and encrypted platforms. The report highlights the persistence of both known imagery and newly produced content, including an emerging share generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence tools.
A 40 percent annual increase in reports signals both better detection and an operational environment outpacing manual review capacity, creating an urgent need for systems that triage risk and surface the most serious cases without delay. Anti-CSAM detection that operates in real time within direct-message environments, identifying not only known material through hashing but also recognising the conversational precursors to production and distribution such as coercion and solicitation, enables law enforcement and platform trust-and-safety teams to intervene at the point of highest threat, prioritising live cases where a child is at immediate risk over retrospective analysis of archived reports.