What happened

A UNICEF study concludes that about 19 percent of Brazilian children and adolescents aged 12–17 (around 3 million young people) were victims of technology‑facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse in a 12‑month period from 2024 to early 2025.

Per the researchers, generative AI is being used to create sexually explicit images and videos using a child’s likeness (deepfakes), often based on family social media photos, which are then shared and weaponised for harassment, extortion, and humiliation, including grooming, coercion to produce sexual content, non‑consensual sharing of intimate images, and exposure to unwanted sexual material on social networks, messaging apps, and online games.

Studies report that tech‑facilitated sexual violence survivors are over five times more likely to self‑injure or consider suicide than non‑victims.

Many children do not report the abuse due to shame, fear of not being believed, not knowing where to report, or fear that others will find out, thereby leaving the perpetrators unpunished and harm ongoing.

Why it happened

The crisis is rooted in the lack of meaningful safeguards built into many generative AI systems, the prioritisation of speed over ethical governance, the normalisation of digital violence, and a lack of corporate accountability.

Large-scale, open-source training datasets such as LAION-5B inadvertently included personal photos of Brazilian children, providing the "raw material" for AI to clone their likenesses.

Once AI models like Stable Diffusion are released, they cannot easily be "un-trained" or updated to remove harmful data, allowing bad actors to use them offline or on unregulated platforms.

Experts argue that tech companies prioritised rapid market release over "safety by design," failing to implement robust filters to prevent the generation of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material).

The report found that 12 percent of victims did not report the abuse because they felt it was "not serious enough," suggesting a dangerous normalisation of digital violence.