In September, UNICEF published Through Children’s Eyes: How Digital Technologies Facilitate Child Sexual Abuse, a report that introduces a particularly important element for advancing prevention: listening to children’s voices.
The research, conducted as part of the Disrupting Harm project in collaboration with ECPAT International and INTERPOL, draws on surveys of nearly 21,000 adolescents aged 12 to 17 across 21 countries, as well as in-depth interviews with more than 100 young people who experienced these forms of abuse during childhood.
Their testimonies reveal fear, shame, confusion, and isolation. Recalling these experiences is deeply painful, but, according to UNICEF, listening to survivors helps us better understand the barriers they face when they need help. More than four in ten incidents were never disclosed to anyone, and fewer than 1% came to the attention of the police, social services, or helplines.
One of the most common reasons for remaining silent, according to the young people’s accounts, was simply not knowing where to turn or whom to tell.
Listening to children shifts the focus away from what they should do to protect themselves and towards how adults can build safe and protective environments where children can ask for help and be heard when they experience abuse. UNICEF highlights the need for trusted reporting and support systems, as well as ensuring that families, schools, and communities know how to respond and support children in seeking help safely.
This is particularly important because the report challenges the image of perpetrators as strangers encountered exclusively online. In 57% of the experiences analysed, the person involved was someone the child already knew, such as a friend, partner, family member, or another child.
Prevention, however, goes beyond teaching children to use the internet cautiously. UNICEF calls for digital platforms to be safe by design, with stronger privacy protections, restrictions on unsolicited contact between adults and children, safer recommendation systems, and better mechanisms for detecting and reporting abuse.
In line with this approach, the report proposes strengthening legislation, regulation, and accountability in response to emerging forms of violence, including sexual extortion and AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Responsibility for ensuring safe digital spaces therefore also lies with governments, technology companies, and child protection systems—not with those who may experience violence.
This transformation also requires addressing the social attitudes that enable violence and silence survivors. Among its recommendations, UNICEF explicitly highlights the need to challenge the normalisation of girls’ hypersexualisation and the stigmatisation of survivors of sexual abuse.
Including children’s voices does not mean making them responsible for finding solutions. It means creating protective environments where children can identify and describe what is happening to them, speak about their experiences, and find people who will take a stand, believe and support them, report abuse on behalf of those who cannot do so themselves, and ensure they have access to effective responses.
Originally published in Periódico Educación on 4 October 2026. The article was also published in Diario Feminista on 24 September 2026.
Cofounder of "Sherezade: Dialoguing Feminism" Women's Group