News Desk
The bedroom in a quiet Lahore neighborhood felt like the safest place in the world for 13-year-old Farhan. The soft blue glow of a smartphone illuminated his face as he logged onto his favorite online multiplayer game each evening after completing his homework. To his parents watching from the doorway, he was simply playing video games with school friends. But behind an avatar offering free in-game currency was a predator operating thousands of miles away—a stranger who spent weeks gaining Farhan’s trust before trapping him in a nightmare of digital extortion and sexual exploitation.
Farhan is far from an isolated case. Across Pakistan, rapid digitisation and the widespread adoption of smartphones have quietly transformed living rooms and study desks into unmonitored hunting grounds. Law enforcement agencies, including the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA), have uncovered organized online networks leveraging gaming platforms, dark web channels, and encrypted messaging apps to groom, manipulate, and blackmail minors. For millions of children navigating the web, the greatest threat no longer lurks on street corners—it waits silently on the devices resting in the palms of their hands.
A September 2026 report by UNICEF, ECPAT International and INTERPOL has placed the scale of the problem in stark relief. Nearly 1.5 million internet-using children aged 12 to 17 in Pakistan experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse in a single year.
Yet the report reveals a more disturbing institutional failure: children are suffering in silence, families fear stigma, and the path from victimisation to justice remains deeply obstructed. The crisis is not simply about what predators do online. It is also about how effectively Pakistan’s institutions protect children when digital spaces become instruments of abuse.
Millions exposed to online abuse
The findings of UNICEF’s report, Disrupting Harm in Pakistan, offer one of the clearest pictures yet of technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation in the country. Nearly one in 16 internet-using children aged 12–17 experienced such abuse in a year, equivalent to approximately 1.5 million children. The documented forms of exploitation include unwanted sexual images and conversations, demands for intimate photographs, the unauthorised circulation of children’s images, threats involving sexual material and the creation of fake sexual images or videos using artificial intelligence.
The scale becomes even more alarming when placed alongside UNICEF’s global findings.
Its separate report, Through Children’s Eyes: How Digital Technologies Enable Child Sexual Abuse, estimated that approximately 20 million internet-using children aged 12–17 across 21 countries experienced technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse in a single year. More than 15 million were exposed to unwanted sexual content, while around four million had sexual images of themselves shared without consent. Nearly 1.1 million children were reported to have experienced AI-generated sexual images or videos depicting them. These are global estimates, not Pakistan-specific totals, but they underline the speed with which digital tools can amplify abuse.
For Pakistan, the national estimate alone should be enough to dispel any assumption that online exploitation is an isolated problem affecting a handful of vulnerable children. The figures point to a threat embedded in the digital environments where young people increasingly learn, socialise and spend their leisure time.
Predators exploit familiarity and trust
The popular image of an online predator as a stranger lurking behind a false identity fails to capture the reality documented by UNICEF. In 85 percent of the incidents reported by children in the Pakistan study, the perpetrator was someone they already knew.
Social media platforms accounted for 44 percent of reported instances of abuse, making them the most commonly identified digital environment in the research. That finding exposes a serious weakness in the conventional understanding of online safety. Children may be warned against accepting friend requests from strangers, but such advice offers limited protection when exploitation comes from a classmate, acquaintance, romantic partner or another person already within their social circle.
Abuse can develop gradually. A conversation may turn into inappropriate requests, pressure to share intimate images or threats to publish material already obtained.
Sexual extortion can then be used to force a child into further compliance. The availability of artificial intelligence adds another dimension: fabricated sexual imagery can be produced or manipulated without the child ever having created or shared an intimate photograph. The resulting harm does not depend on whether an image is genuine. A fabricated image can still be used to humiliate, intimidate, blackmail or isolate a child.
The technology lowers the barriers to creating abusive material while making the threat of exposure more difficult for victims to escape.
Silence conceals the true scale
Perhaps the most troubling finding in the Pakistan report is the extent to which abuse remains unreported. More than half of the children who experienced technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse did not tell anyone. None of the children surveyed reported their experience through formal channels such as helplines, social workers or the police. UNICEF identified community stigma, victim-blaming and a lack of trust in law enforcement as major barriers to disclosure.
These findings create a serious problem for official responses. Police records can show the cases brought to their attention, but they cannot represent the full scale of abuse when children are too frightened or ashamed to report what happened. A low number of complaints cannot automatically be interpreted as evidence of a low level of offending.
For children, disclosure can mean confronting questions about why they responded to a message, trusted someone or shared an image. Fear of punishment by parents, damage to their reputation or humiliation among classmates can make silence seem safer than seeking help. Predators can exploit precisely these fears, using the possibility of exposure as leverage.
The burden is particularly difficult for boys, whose experiences can be obscured by social expectations about masculinity and assumptions that they are less vulnerable to sexual abuse. UNICEF found that girls and boys experienced technology-facilitated sexual exploitation at similar rates, although the circumstances and pressures surrounding their experiences could differ.
When shame protects perpetrators and discourages victims from speaking, the consequences extend beyond the original offence. Children may face continuing threats, anxiety, isolation and disruption to their education and relationships. The digital material can also be copied and redistributed, allowing the abuse to persist long after the original incident.
Legal framework exists, but gaps in protection
Pakistan does have laws addressing online sexual exploitation. The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), 2016, criminalises specified activities involving sexually explicit material depicting minors. Its provisions also cover online grooming and solicitation, among other offences.
Section 22 provides for imprisonment and financial penalties, while allowing an affected person or a minor’s guardian to seek the removal, destruction or blocking of specified material. The existence of these provisions, however, does not establish that children can obtain protection quickly or navigate the justice system without further harm.
UNICEF’s Pakistan study identifies gaps in the legal and institutional response, including the absence of a systematic requirement for child forensic interviews to be conducted by specially trained professionals. Inappropriate questioning can expose children to secondary victimisation while they are trying to report abuse. The report also flags the continued use of the term “child pornography” in PECA to describe child sexual abuse material.
The terminology is widely criticised in child-protection contexts because it can obscure the coercion and exploitation involved and risk suggesting that the material is a legitimate form of pornography rather than evidence of abuse.
These shortcomings matter because a criminal prohibition is only one part of an effective response.
Children must be able to report offences, have evidence handled sensitively, obtain support and see allegations investigated. Where those steps are difficult to access, the distance between legal protection and practical safety remains substantial.
Enforcement figures tell only part of the story
Available official figures on registered cases also illustrate the limits of measuring this crisis through enforcement statistics alone. Data compiled by The State of Children in Pakistan, citing the Federal Investigation Agency and the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, show 53 first information reports registered for online child sexual exploitation and abuse in 2021, 65 in 2022, 51 in 2023, 58 in 2024 and 52 in 2025.
These figures represent registered cases, not the total number of children abused, and should not be treated as a measure of prevalence. Their significance lies in the contrast between the small number of formal cases and UNICEF’s estimate that approximately 1.5 million children experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse in a year.
The two datasets measure different things and cannot be directly compared as equivalent counts. Nevertheless, the survey findings on non-disclosure make clear why case registration alone cannot reveal the true extent of the problem. The failure to report is itself a major part of the crisis.
Pakistan’s cybercrime authorities have also faced the broader challenge of investigating online offences that cross platforms and borders. The anonymity offered by digital accounts, the rapid circulation of images and the use of emerging technologies complicate efforts to identify offenders and preserve evidence. In child-exploitation cases, delays can leave victims exposed to continued intimidation or the further distribution of abusive material.
Platforms cannot escape responsibility
The scale of exploitation documented by UNICEF raises questions not only about policing but also about the digital platforms through which abuse takes place. Social media and online gaming can offer children valuable opportunities to learn, communicate and participate in communities. The same environments can also provide predators with access to young users, private messaging and tools for circulating harmful material.
The global UNICEF study found that nearly 60 percent of reported cases occurred on social media platforms and 14 percent in online games. In Pakistan, social media was also the most commonly reported digital environment in the national research. These findings make it difficult to treat online safety solely as a matter of parental supervision.
Parents may not know what takes place in private chats, whether an image has been copied or whether a familiar online contact is exerting pressure on a child. Children themselves may not recognise grooming until a relationship has become coercive.
Responsibility cannot therefore rest exclusively on young users being told to exercise caution. The scale and complexity of the problem also place scrutiny on platform safeguards, reporting mechanisms and responses to complaints involving minors.
A system that allows harmful material to circulate while victims struggle to seek help leaves children carrying the consequences of failures they did not create.
A childhood under digital threat
Pakistan’s digital child-safety crisis is defined by more than alarming statistics. It is defined by the gap between the enormous number of children exposed to abuse and the near absence of formal reporting in the UNICEF survey. It is defined by perpetrators exploiting familiar relationships, by families constrained by stigma, and by legal protections that still face serious questions about implementation and child-sensitive justice.
The internet has become an essential part of modern childhood, but access to digital spaces also brings risks that children cannot be expected to manage alone. When intimate images become tools of blackmail, artificial intelligence can manufacture sexualised depictions of minors, and fear prevents victims from approaching authorities, online abuse is no longer a marginal cybercrime concern. It is a direct assault on children’s safety and dignity.
The evidence published in September leaves little room to dismiss the problem as a handful of isolated incidents. For approximately 1.5 million internet-using children in Pakistan, technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse was not a hypothetical danger. It was a lived experience. The central failure is that so many children remain unheard, while the systems meant to protect them struggle to turn formal safeguards into accessible, effective protection.
