Many of you have heard about — or watched — the recent documentary Can’t Look Away directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz. If you haven’t yet, it tells the stories of families whose children were fatally harmed while using everyday social media apps — the same apps millions of kids scroll through every day. Trigger warning: it is not an “easy” film to watch — but I hope that many do. It contains references to child suicide, drug use, and child sexual abuse ...

Child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) remains one of the gravest and most under-addressed threats to children’s safety and well-being in the United States. While awareness of the issue has grown in recent years, meaningful progress to prevent abuse, support survivors, and hold perpetrators accountable continues to lag. It is within this context that World Childhood Foundation USA presents these findings — a sobering but necessary snapshot of how each U.S. state responds to CSAE. The United States Out of the Shadows Index (OOSI) provides a ground-breaking, ...

I will always remember the first time I heard about the dangers of child sexual abuse while playing games online. I was listening to members of the FBI discuss cases of sextortion. Having just bought my nephew a gift card for gaming, I was very alarmed — and upset that perpetrators had figured out yet another way to exploit children. When I speak to parents about it, many yearn for the days when they were young — and children in their bedrooms, ...

I recently attended a national meeting of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and listened to the latest updates from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on AI dangers to children, the growing levels of sextortion, how manuals are being produced online by AI for predators about how to groom a child, the use of “nudify” which is an app to create naked images of children by digitally removing their clothing, and other topics. I left a bit stunned — and ...

by Mary L. Pulido, PhD and Professor Marci A. Hamilton Although child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, the groundbreaking Out of the Shadows Index report from Economist Impact and the World Childhood Foundation USA establishes that a majority of states in the U.S. has failed to protect children from this crime. This jarring report provides an in-depth analysis of 28 states’ failures to protect children: 25 states earned an “F” while the three others scored a D-. Current statistics paint ...

Earlier this year, I read a research report by Protect Children that truly should have caused a riot in defense of innocent children who are victimized online (and probably off-line) by child sexual abuse. It was groundbreaking in its research on sexual abuse offenders of children — and offered concrete and actionable suggestions for the Tech industry. The critical insights about perpetrators and tech platforms are a “must-know” for parents — and aunts, uncles, grandparents, caretakers, concerned friends and all — to help protect ...

Earlier this year, I read a research report by Protect Children that truly should have caused a riot in defense of innocent children who are victimized online (and probably off-line) by child sexual abuse. It was groundbreaking in its research on sexual abuse offenders of children — and offered concrete and actionable suggestions for the Tech industry. The critical insights about perpetrators and tech platforms are a “must-know” for parents — and aunts, uncles, grandparents, caretakers, concerned friends and all — to help protect ...