Industry & Economics

Open Access: Yes.

Abstract

Technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (TF-CSEA) is an escalating global crisis. Digital platforms, social media, livestreaming services, and online payment systems enable sexual abuse of children at unprecedented scale and speed.

Reports of online grooming, financial sextortion, livestreamed abuse, and AI-generated child sexual abuse material continue to rise across regions. Existing interventions struggle to keep pace with technological change, allowing offenders to operate across borders with limited risk of detection or disruption.

This assessment synthesizes the evidence on detecting, deterring, investigating, and prosecuting TF-CSEA from over 100 high-quality studies published over the past decade. Following standard PRISMA and synthesis protocols, the review assesses technical, legal, policing, behavioral, and educational interventions and provides four key findings:

1. Most interventions focus on detecting abuse after it occurs. Far fewer disrupt the systems that enable TF-CSEA, including payment mechanisms, advertising and recruitment pathways, and judicial capacity.
2. Technical tools reduce harm at scale but depend on legal authority, secure data access, safeguards, and effective enforcement. Without these, automated and AI-assisted tools have limited impact.
3. Behavioral and educational interventions reduce risk and increase awareness, but cannot replace platform accountability. Evidence of sustained behavior change remains limited without regulatory and enforcement support.
4. Financial systems are the most underused leverage point against TF-CSEA. Few interventions disrupt payments financing abuse, focusing instead on tracing transactions after harm occurs.

This synthesis provides the most comprehensive assessment of TF-CSEA interventions to date. Evidence gaps remain, especially on payment disruption and long-term outcomes. Nonetheless, the findings establish clear consensus on the need for coordinated legal authority, scalable technical systems, sustained enforcement, and action to interrupt financial flows.

Relevance

This study identifies several ways that mainstream pornography platforms, and the financial institutions that assist them, are complicit in child sexual exploitation.

Many platforms, such as Pornhub, feature “barely legal” content, which fosters interest in children as sexual objects.

Tech companies were found to have comprised only 8% of intervention developers and 105 of intervention implementers.

Recommendations include “Legislators should update relevant laws and regulations, including extending the duty to report suspicious financial transactions to digital payment and gift exchange platforms, to bridge the gap in financial interventions to combat TF-CSEA. Where appropriate, legislators should also introduce legal requirements for financial institutions, digital payment, and gift exchange platforms known for their frequent use of financing TF-CSEA to disrupt flagged CSEA-related transactions.”

Citation

International Panel on the Information Environment [K. Pothong, S. Kaynak, D. Fry, S. Ghai, S. Livingstone, A. Phippen, C. R. Soriano, L. M. Given, P.N. Howard, S. Valenzuela (eds.)]. (2026). Detecting, Deterring, Investigating, and Prosecuting Technology-Facilitated Child Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse: A Systematic Review. Zurich, Switzerland: IPIE. http://doi.org/10.61452/UZUS7376