UNICEF: 1 in 5 children across 21 countries, including Armenia, have experienced tech-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse
A survey of around 21,000 young people by the UN’s agency for children, UNICEF, has found that online sexual abuse of minors is on the rise.
The internet is not a safe place for unsupervised children and young people. Social media platforms are adept at tweaking their algorithms to ensure users of any age remain on their sites. To do that, they often disseminate content that can be dangerous and upsetting for young people. Social media platforms are adept at tweaking their algorithms to ensure users of any age remain on their sites. To do that, they often disseminate content that can be dangerous and upsetting for young people.
Studies regularly find a connection between what’s known as doomscrolling and a higher risk of psychological problems in the young, including suicidal thoughts. And some of the latest trends in video creation on platforms like TikTok directly endanger the safety of users.
In the United States, Meta, which owns both Instagram and Facebook, recently opted to settle a case against it out of court.
A new survey by UNICEF, the UN agency for children, puts the spotlight on another danger that young people constantly face in the digital world: sexual assault, a threat experienced by one in five people between the ages of 12 and 17 over the past year.
The UNICEF report explains how such attacks often happen.
“It often begins without warning,” the authors of the study wrote. “Conversation becomes coercion, and coercion becomes entrapment.”
Often, the perpetrator of the assault puts pressure on a victim. The victims then feel ashamed and this makes it difficult to tell anybody about what has happened. Of those surveyed, 41% had never told anybody about their assault. Others said they had first confided in friends, siblings or their mothers.
The stereotype many have of a complete stranger harassing young people online actually only applies in 16% of cases. Most perpetrators — 57% — are already known to their victims. They may be friends, family members or even romantic partners.In addition, 27% of respondents were not able to identify the people behind the profiles. When perpetrators are known, they include adults but also minors. In many cases, attacks take place in real life as well as online.
The major social media platforms are also the main gateways for this kind of behavior. The UNICEF report says 60% of assaults come primarily from Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (all of which are owned by Meta), followed by Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. And 14% of respondents cited online gaming platforms as the location of an assault — gaming platforms usually have direct messaging channels.
The report polled around 21,000 young people in 21 countries, aged between 12 and 17, who regularly use the internet. Data from 12 countries — Ethiopia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mozambique, Namibia, the Philippines, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda and Vietnam — had already been collected in 2020 and 2021 and analyzed in an earlier report.
For this new report, additional data was collected in Armenia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Pakistan and Serbia.
