Growth in online child sexual exploitation and abuse must be urgently addressed

The UN Special Representative on violence against children released a report marking the 15-year anniversary of the mandate, revealing that 300 million children have been affected by online sexual exploitation and abuse over the past 12 months. The report documents increasing numbers of young children getting online and corresponding growth in exploitation, issued alongside broader findings on the evolution of digital threats to children since the mandate's inception.

When 300 million children experience online sexual abuse and exploitation annually, the operational question is how to surface the fraction who face the greatest immediate danger and connect them to help. Guardii's crisis-detection capability scores conversation patterns for acute threat rather than relying on volume-based content moderation, distinguishing between exploratory contact and imminent harm. The backed-by-Startmate platform enables schools and safeguarding authorities to allocate finite intervention resources to the children the data shows are in escalating danger right now, triaging by behavioural signal rather than self-disclosure, and providing a pathway from automated threat recognition to human professional response at the scale the UN figures demand.