Very young children dealing with nude photos online, helpline warns

A Dutch hotline processed nearly 1 million images and videos of child sexual abuse material in 2025, the highest number on record, with 40 percent created and shared by the minors themselves — many of them children between 7 and 10 years old.

Offlimits, the expertise center for online abuse, said 85 percent of the self-produced material came from children younger than 12. The organization described the sharp rise in very young children making and sharing nude photos and videos of themselves as alarming and disturbing.

“I worked at the police for a long time. Ten years ago we didn’t see this,” Madeleine van der Bruggen, Offlimits’ deputy director, told AD. “We are getting signals from therapists that more and more children are dealing with this at a younger age.”

The increase is reportedly linked to children gaining unsupervised access to phones or iPads at younger ages, where not all platforms are blocked. They often start on TikTok thinking they are talking to someone of the same age but are then lured to other platforms.

“There they are seduced or forced to send nude images, while they are not yet occupied with sexuality at all,” van der Bruggen said. “They often don’t even interpret it sexually. Later they do. Children sometimes only realize at a later age what the damage is.”

Once the material is sent, the children can be blackmailed and forced to send more. Such behavior does not fit with normal sexual development for pre-pubescent boys and girls and disrupts it, van der Bruggen said. Therapists report that many of the children have a background of abuse or violence, though not always.

The situation worsened in 2025 after already showing a huge increase in 2024, which led to exploratory research. A major study by the WODC, the scientific research and data center, is now under way to determine how children end up in networks or places where sexual image material is exchanged. “We don’t know and want to find out,” officials said.

“The perpetrator is the only one to blame,” van der Bruggen said. "But we recommend parents: check in with your child. Sit with them, or ask how the day went online. Out of interest.” Nevertheless, a survey published in April showed that 70 percent of the surveyed population supports banning social media use for children under 15.

Schools should also play a role by integrating digital skills into the standard curriculum, van der Bruggen said, not just in the upper grades. “Then you’re already too late.”