In 2025, as in previous years, the majority of child sexual abuse imagery reported depicted girls. The breakdown below reflects the number of children by sex, and the overall proportion has remained largely consistent over the past two years. The sex of a child can only be recorded for single‑image cases; for multi‑image collages, only the severity classification is recorded.
These figures represent the total number of boys and girls identified across all images, rather than the number of victims per image. We do not record sex and age data on videos so they are not included here.
It is interesting to note that whilst girls were by far most often seen (77%) by our Assessors in child sexual abuse images in 2025, when it comes to those children reporting their own images via the Report Remove service, it is predominantly boys seen in the imagery reported (79%).
Boys are also more likely than girls to feature in reports involving sextortion, accounting for 98% of such cases.
Some readers may find the following descriptions distressing, please feel free to skip this section.
We see a significantly higher proportion of girls in the child sexual abuse material we assess. Girls appear in almost all of the ‘self-generated’ imagery we take action on, with younger boys generally more likely to appear in commercially produced and distributed abuse material, and older teen boys increasingly reporting imagery to us directly via Report Remove. We have observed that teenage boys seem to be particularly targeted for sexually motivated extortion.