Online child exploitation is increasing across Europe, alongside AI-generated abuse content. Which countries are emerging as hotspots for abuse material?
With today's children growing up in a highly digitalised environment, there are increasing concerns about their exposure to harmful online content.
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More than 4.5 million reports of potentially illegal online content were received by EU co-funded hotlines in 2025, according to the latest data from the Better Internet for Kids Hotline Observatory.
Over half of these reports were related to child sexual abuse material or child sexual exploitation material.
In addition, 63% of the global child sexual abuse URLs identified by the child protection tech charity Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) last year were traced to hosting services in EU member states.
Bulgaria is the worst country in the EU for the number of criminal webpages hosted, moving up 19 percentage points from second place in 2024.
This is followed by the Netherlands and Romania, which were found to host 33,788 child sexual abuse webpages and 21,188 webpages, respectively.
There were also significant increases in France and Germany in 2025.
"Children, victims and survivors of sexual abuse in the EU are being failed by those who have been elected to represent them," said Kerry Smith, Internet Watch Foundation CEO, in a statement.
Globally, the worst three countries are Bulgaria with 28% of the total child sexual abuse webpages, the United States with 16%, and the Netherlands with 11%.
Emerging threats
In the first half of 2025, analysts from the IWF recorded a 400% increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material, with such material identified on 210 webpages.
Reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material have also been increasingly linked to cases of grooming, sexual extortion and blackmail.
The connection between online grooming, sexual exploitation and child disappearance is often overlooked, according to the European federation for missing and sexually exploited children, Missing Children Europe.
In Western Europe, one in five children reports experiencing online solicitation or grooming before turning 18.
In addition, in 2025, Europe's missing children hotlines identified 92 cases where online grooming was linked to a child going missing.
Grooming can target any child, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, or socio-economic background.
However, low self-esteem, negative self-image, and mental health difficulties among children have been identified as risk factors that offenders may exploit in the grooming process.
Girls are more likely to be targeted for online grooming, although boys are also at risk, with cases involving boys more likely to go underreported.
Victims often don't report due to fear, stigma, or lack of recognition of grooming behaviours, limiting the visibility of the phenomenon.