Bogotá, Colombia – Around 21% of Colombian minors aged between 12 and 17 have been victims of online sexual abuse in the past year, according to a report published last week by UNICEF-Innocenti, ECPAT International, and INTERPOL.
The report, “Disrupting Harm,” covered 25 countries including Colombia and examines how technology use, including new tools like artificial intelligence (AI) are helping to facilitate online abuse.
The investigation was made between 2023 and 2025, and the results are alarming: around 860,000 Colombian adolescents experienced some type of digital sexual abuse or exploitation in just one year (2024) .
Data also pointed to gender and economic disparities. A quarter of young women surveyed said they’d been victims of this type of abuse or exploitation while 17% of young men said the same. In poorer, rural areas of the country, 29% of minor respondents said they’d been victimized while 17% living in urban areas said they had been.
In addition to social dynamics in Colombia, including deep-rooted “machismo”, prevalent domestic and gender based violence, and extreme wealth inequality, technology is increasingly becoming a factor in the abuse of children.
According to a 2025 study by the Communications Regulation Commission (CRC), during the past year, 81% of teenagers between 14 and 17, and 55% of pre-adolescents aged 10 to 13, reported having their own cell phones.
Experts say that since the pandemic, interactions among children and adolescents have increased significantly. Cell phones have become a ‘fundamental’ tool for maintaining social status and escaping reality, especially for those facing family problems.
“It is essential that children do not fear being punished or having their phones taken away for responding to a message. We saw in the study that this is one of their biggest fears: losing their connection to the rest of the world,” Camila Perera, a specialist at the Office of Research and Data for UNICEF Innocenti, told Latin America Reports.
Nearly half of the reported cases of abuse happened on social media platforms such as Facebook (80%), WhatsApp (30%), and Instagram (17%), while 14% were linked to online gaming networks.
In addition, 2% of victims reported that artificial intelligence was used to create fake explicit content using their faces – highlighting a newer phenomenon that became widely discussed last year after Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok began creating millions of sexualized images of people online.
With the introduction of such technologies, regulators and parents are struggling to keep up.
“Minors, with their superior digital skills, moved much faster than any safety measures could. While they advance, protection protocols simply cannot keep up,” Fabio González Florez, Project Leader at ECPAT International, told Latin America Reports.
“There is a serious obligation to stay informed, and that doesn’t require a postgraduate degree. Tutorials are everywhere, and every platform offers parental controls that we must learn to use,” he added.
A stranger behind a screen? The ‘real’ danger
Contrary to popular belief, the threat is not always an anonymous hacker hiding in the dark; in fact, only 30% of victims met their aggressor online.
In half of the documented cases, children were abused by someone they already knew, including family members, neighbors, and classmates. Due to this approach, some of the minors can’t recognize the abuse or feel safe enough to ask for help.
“There’s a common expression: ‘stranger danger’, the idea that we must only be looking for outsiders. However, the majority of the abusers are actually the ones close to the family,” stated González.
The findings are also exposing another difficult situation: one in five cases of online sexual abuse against a minor was made by another minor. It was found that some victims will look to target or recruit their peers to re-victimize in exchange for incentives or “freedom.”
The report also highlights that victims often suffer from severe mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and propensity to self harm.
Even if many minors prefer to remain silent, when they decide to speak out, they usually look for their mothers, siblings, or a friend. This is a message about the importance of creating trust-based relationships with children.
“Beyond digital parenting, we must ensure the kids see their parents as sources of protection. They need to be someone they can talk to about sexuality, consent, and limits without being judged,” Perera recommended. “It is about being a source of trust so they can come to us with their doubts and curiosities.”
Despite existing channels in Colombia, such as the ICBF’s 141 line or the National Police’s “¡A Denunciar!” portal, the study found that formal reporting is almost non-existent between minor victims.
Protection measures: Are they enough?
With increased connectivity via the internet, the threat landscape for online abusers of Colombian children expands immensely.
“Our obligation is to work with our 196 member countries; also, we have specific resolutions focused on child protection,” a member of INTERPOL, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of their work, told Latin America Reports. “Another critical measure is urging countries to adopt protocols to detect and block URLs containing sexual abuse and exploitation material to prevent the commercialization of such content.”
However, risks remain in an increasingly interconnected world: “A single image of a Colombian child can be reproduced globally across time and geography; therefore, the response to protect them must be a national priority”, the INTERPOL member said.
Finally, the investigation calls on digital companies to contribute to risk reduction by incorporating prevention into platform design and improving safety measures. The research is also looking for new prevention tools for transforming both physical and digital spaces and eliminating the conditions that facilitate violence.
This issue requires concrete actions from all sectors: the protection system, families, and technology companies.
Featured image credit: UNICEF
The post In less than a year, 1 in 5 minors in Colombia suffered online sexual violence, UNICEF, ECPAT, and INTERPOL warn appeared first on Latin America Reports.