News Summary

• Technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), including online grooming, sexual solicitation, non-consensual image sharing and sexual extortion, has emerged as an urgent yet underexamined category of digital harms.
• Despite growing policy attention to online safety, evidence remains limited, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
• We analysed nationally representative survey data from 11,912 children aged 12–17 years across 12 countries in eastern and southern Africa and Southeast Asia.