What the 2024 NCMEC CyberTipline Report says about child safety

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's 2024 CyberTipline Report shows the CyberTipline received 20.5 million reports in 2024, a 43 percent decrease from the 36.2 million reports in 2023, though when adjusted for incidents to account for bundled reports, the number is 29.2 million distinct incidents, including nearly 63 million files comprising images, videos and other materials related to child sexual exploitation. Online enticement, crimes involving an adult communicating with a child for sexual purposes, rose 192 percent, reaching more than 546,000 tips. This dramatic increase is likely due in part to the new REPORT Act, which requires companies to report online enticement and child sex trafficking for the first time. The report noted the continued global nature of child sexual exploitation online with 84 percent of incidents involving offenders or victims outside the United States.

A 192 percent increase in online enticement reports to the CyberTipline, driven in part by the REPORT Act mandating companies to report such incidents, underscores that the volume of harmful contact reaching children far exceeds the capacity of retrospective investigation. Detection deployed at the point of contact that identifies when an adult is communicating with a child for sexual purposes intercepts the enticement before it escalates. As a Meta Business Partner, Guardii operates anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection modules that recognise sustained targeting, escalation and coercion in direct-message conversations in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, surfaces a child in crisis to a parent or professional, and enables rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency.