Bogotá, Colombia – Round 21% of Colombian minors aged between 12 and 17 have been victims of on-line sexual abuse previously yr, in keeping with a report printed final week by UNICEF-Innocenti, ECPAT Worldwide, and INTERPOL.
The report, “Disrupting Harm,” lined 25 international locations together with Colombia and examines how know-how use, together with new instruments like synthetic intelligence (AI) are serving to to facilitate on-line abuse.
The investigation was made between 2023 and 2025, and the outcomes are alarming: round 860,000 Colombian adolescents skilled some sort of digital sexual abuse or exploitation in only one yr (2024) .
Knowledge additionally pointed to gender and financial disparities. 1 / 4 of younger girls surveyed stated they’d been victims of one of these abuse or exploitation whereas 17% of younger males stated the identical. In poorer, rural areas of the nation, 29% of minor respondents stated they’d been victimized whereas 17% residing in city areas stated that they had been.
Along with social dynamics in Colombia, together with deep-rooted “machismo”, prevalent domestic and gender based violence, and excessive wealth inequality, know-how is more and more changing into an element within the abuse of kids.
Based on a 2025 research by the Communications Regulation Commission (CRC), throughout the previous yr, 81% of youngsters between 14 and 17, and 55% of pre-adolescents aged 10 to 13, reported having their very own cell telephones.
Specialists say that for the reason that pandemic, interactions amongst youngsters and adolescents have elevated considerably. Cell telephones have grow to be a ‘elementary’ instrument for sustaining social standing and escaping actuality, particularly for these going through household issues.
“It’s important that youngsters don’t worry being punished or having their telephones taken away for responding to a message. We noticed within the research that that is one in all their largest fears: shedding their connection to the remainder of the world,” Camila Perera, a specialist on the Workplace of Analysis and Knowledge for UNICEF Innocenti, advised Latin America Stories.
Almost half of the reported circumstances of abuse occurred on social media platforms similar to Fb (80%), WhatsApp (30%), and Instagram (17%), whereas 14% had been linked to on-line gaming networks.
As well as, 2% of victims reported that synthetic intelligence was used to create pretend specific content material utilizing their faces – highlighting a more moderen phenomenon that turned extensively mentioned final yr after Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok started creating hundreds of thousands of sexualized photographs of individuals on-line.
With the introduction of such applied sciences, regulators and oldsters are struggling to maintain up.
“Minors, with their superior digital expertise, moved a lot sooner than any security measures might. Whereas they advance, safety protocols merely can not sustain,” Fabio González Florez, Mission Chief at ECPAT Worldwide, advised Latin America Stories.
“There’s a critical obligation to remain knowledgeable, and that doesn’t require a postgraduate diploma. Tutorials are all over the place, and each platform affords parental controls that we should be taught to make use of,” he added.
A stranger behind a display? The ‘actual’ hazard
Opposite to in style perception, the menace shouldn’t be all the time an nameless hacker hiding at the hours of darkness; in actual fact, solely 30% of victims met their aggressor on-line.
In half of the documented circumstances, youngsters had been abused by somebody they already knew, together with members of the family, neighbors, and classmates. Attributable to this method, a few of the minors can’t acknowledge the abuse or really feel secure sufficient to ask for assist.
“There’s a standard expression: ‘stranger hazard’, the concept we should solely be searching for outsiders. Nonetheless, nearly all of the abusers are literally those near the household,” acknowledged González.
The findings are additionally exposing one other tough state of affairs: one in 5 circumstances of on-line sexual abuse in opposition to a minor was made by one other minor. It was discovered that some victims will look to focus on or recruit their friends to re-victimize in alternate for incentives or “freedom.”
The report additionally highlights that victims typically endure from extreme psychological well being points, together with anxiousness, melancholy and propensity to self hurt.
Even when many minors choose to stay silent, after they determine to talk out, they often search for their moms, siblings, or a buddy. This can be a message in regards to the significance of making trust-based relationships with youngsters.
“Past digital parenting, we should guarantee the children see their dad and mom as sources of safety. They must be somebody they will speak to about sexuality, consent, and limits with out being judged,” Perera really helpful. “It’s about being a supply of belief to allow them to come to us with their doubts and curiosities.”
Regardless of present channels in Colombia, such because the ICBF’s 141 line or the Nationwide Police’s “¡A Denunciar!” portal, the research discovered that formal reporting is nearly non-existent between minor victims.
Safety measures: Are they sufficient?
With elevated connectivity by way of the web, the menace panorama for on-line abusers of Colombian youngsters expands immensely.
“Our obligation is to work with our 196 member international locations; additionally, we have now particular resolutions centered on youngster safety,” a member of INTERPOL, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of their work, advised Latin America Stories. “One other important measure is urging international locations to undertake protocols to detect and block URLs containing sexual abuse and exploitation materials to forestall the commercialization of such content material.”
Nonetheless, dangers stay in an more and more interconnected world: “A single picture of a Colombian youngster might be reproduced globally throughout time and geography; due to this fact, the response to guard them should be a nationwide precedence”, the INTERPOL member stated.
Lastly, the investigation calls on digital corporations to contribute to danger discount by incorporating prevention into platform design and bettering security measures. The analysis can be searching for new prevention instruments for reworking each bodily and digital areas and eliminating the situations that facilitate violence.
This difficulty requires concrete actions from all sectors: the safety system, households, and know-how corporations.
Featured picture credit score: UNICEF
