Alarming numbers: Increasing sexual abuse representations on the Internet!

Alarming numbers: Increasing sexual abuse representations on the Internet!

In 2025, the number of reports of sexual abuse representations of minors in Austria achieved an alarming climax. Until the Safer Internet Day on February 11th, the Stopline contact point already recorded 11,269 reports. 10,520 of this proved to be true. For comparison: In the entire year 2024 there were only 11,169 confirmed cases. This dramatic increase is not only worrying, but also leads to increased measures to identify those responsible and remove the content in question, as the head of the Barbara Schloßbauer reporting office emphasizes. Artificial intelligence is also increasingly being used to produce abuse representations that seem more and more realistic and difficult to differentiate between real and artificially created images. This presents the authorities with great challenges because many content is hosted on servers abroad.

worldwide Situation intensifies

A global overview shows that the problems are not only limited locally. According to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), there were 36.2 million reports on sexual violence against children in 2023. Stopline itself reports 6,649 reports that comply with more than half of the total reports in 2023 for the first two months of the current year. The Internet Watch Foundation also shows a worrying increase in websites that show representations of how children are asked to make sexual actions. This frightening reality is reinforced by signs of sex, a form of blackmail, and underlines the urgency to take effective measures to protect children on the Internet.

Waltraud Gugerbauer from Ecpat Austria also points out that many perpetrators on the open Internet, especially on social media and porn sites, are actively looking for depictions of abuse. 30 % of the respondents of a Finnish study stated that they did not discover such content in the Darknet, but rather discovered on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Telegram. The need for stricter legislation and the responsibility of the technology companies is becoming increasingly urgent in order to effectively counter the horror of sexual abuse and to ensure the safety of children on the net. Ecpat therefore calls for clear European guidelines to protect children from these terrible acts, as well as from Salzburg.ORF.at and ots.at