Every year, more than 300 million children around the world become victims of online sexual abuse. These scary figures were released by the Childlight Global Institute for Child Safety at the University of Edinburgh.
According to the results of the study, writes The Guardian, 12.6% of children worldwide have been victims of non-consensual sexting, sharing and viewing of sexual images and videos. This is every eighth child.
12.5% of minors became victims of online harassment – we are talking about unwanted conversations on sexual topics, in particular sexting, a question of a sexual nature and a request for sexual acts.
But that’s not all – as a rule, criminals demand money from their victims to maintain the confidentiality of images and abuse photo forgery using artificial intelligence.
The United States, the researchers found, is a particularly high-risk area. One in nine people in the country (that's about 14 million people) admitted to having abused children online at some point. 7% of Britons (1.8 million people) also admitted this.
And many men honestly admitted that they would like to commit physical sexual violence against children (!) if they were sure that it would remain a secret. Paul Stanfield, chief executive of Childlight, says:
“This is a stunning scale that in the UK alone equates to a queue of male offenders that could stretch from Glasgow to London or fill Wembley Stadium more than 20 times over. Child abuse is so widespread that on average it is reported to watchdogs and police officers once per second”.
It only remains to add that in Britain, for the first time, a criminal who generated indecent photos of children was banned from using AI.
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