A GROWING EPIDEMIC

The CyberTipline, operated by NCMEC since 1998, is the national reporting mechanism for suspected online child sexual exploitation. Electronic service providers and members of the public submit reports; NCMEC reviews, triages, and forwards actionable reports to law enforcement.

In 2025, the CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports — containing 61.8 million images, videos, and other files related to suspected exploitation. Of those, NCMEC identified and escalated more than 53,000 reports as urgent, involving a child in imminent danger.

For the first time, NCMEC also released a direct same-period comparison: the first six months of 2025 against the first six months of 2024. This is the closest thing to an apples-to-apples measurement available in this dataset, and it is far more useful than any single-year total:

Two categories stand out for very different reasons. The generative AI figure — a jump from 6,835 to 440,419 reports — has no equivalent legal-mandate explanation (Section 03); NCMEC began tracking it only in 2023, and Shehan called its growth "staggering." Offenders are now using AI tools to fabricate sexually explicit images of real children using photos lifted from social media, school postings, or community pages, without ever needing to entice or contact the child directly.

The child sex trafficking figure — up 952% — looks even more dramatic, but NCMEC itself attributes the bulk of that spike to a specific 2024 change in federal law, not solely to more trafficking taking place. That law is the subject of the next section.

On May 7, 2024, Congress passed Public Law 118-59, the Revising Existing Procedures On Reporting via Technology Act — the REPORT Act. It amended Title 18 of the U.S. Code to change what electronic service providers are legally required to send to the CyberTipline, and what happens to that material afterward.

Statistics describe scale; enforcement actions describe outcomes. Between May 2025 and April 2026, the FBI and U.S. Attorneys' offices ran four consecutive nationwide sweeps targeting child sexual abuse offenders. Each is separately documented in Justice Department press releases.

Operation Iron Pursuit alone ran for one month — April 1 to April 30, 2026 — deploying all 56 FBI field offices and their partnered U.S. Attorneys' offices nationwide. In that single month, agents located more than 200 child victims and arrested more than 350 offenders on charges including sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, abuse, kidnapping, and possession, distribution, or receipt of child sexual abuse material.

NCMEC's 2025 media-coverage archive — more than 1,300 pages of local and federal case reporting tied to CyberTipline referrals — documents thousands of individual investigations nationwide. Most are local possession or distribution cases. One entry illustrates how a single tip becomes a federal prosecution.

Salter was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for receipt of child pornography and attempted production of child pornography, followed by a ten-year term of supervised release. The Justice Department's own release on the case closed with the identical phrase examined in Section 01: this prosecution was "brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse."

The FBI maintains a public archive of "Violent Crimes Against Children" news releases, containing thousands of entries spanning years. NFA audited that archive directly and found it counts published press releases — which vary with case updates, operation summaries, and each field office's own publicity practices — not a clean, comparable count of underlying offenses. It cannot, on its own, establish whether crimes against children rose or fell in a given year, and NFA declines to use it that way.

The defensible conclusion: technology has expanded both the reach of exploitation and law enforcement's ability to detect it. Rising report totals reflect a mix of a genuinely growing digital threat, a 2024 law that forced far more mandatory reporting than before, and improved detection technology at NCMEC and partner platforms. The available data cannot cleanly separate how much of the increase is more offending versus more visibility — but it leaves no doubt that the volume of documented harm to children, however measured, is substantial and real.

Behind every statistic in this report is a real person, and for many survivors, the fear that an image or video will resurface never fully goes away. NCMEC operates a free, confidential tool built specifically for this problem.