June 4 / 2025 / Reading Time: 5 minutes
Global experts call for new approach to protect children from ‘pandemic’ of sexual exploitation and abuse
Thirty of the world’s child protection experts have called for the sexual exploitation and abuse of children to be treated as a global public health emergency.
The initiative, led by the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute and the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), envisages a fundamental shift in the global approach to these crimes.
If adopted, it would compel governments to respond to child sexual abuse not merely as a criminal justice issue, but as a preventable pandemic — akin to the worldwide campaigns that successfully tackled smallpox, COVID-19 and tobacco-related deaths.
The proposal was endorsed at a conference hosted by Emory University in Atlanta, USA, with backing from figures from the World Health Organization, the European Parliament, and leading universities across Scotland, Australia, the United States, China and the Philippines.
It follows a recent estimate from Childlight, hosted by the University of Edinburgh and University of New South Wales, that over 300 million children annually are subjected to technology-facilitated sexual abuse and exploitation alone.
These include cases of grooming and sexual extortion where children are blackmailed over intimate images. Many more are also subjected to contact abuse.
Childlight CEO Paul Stanfield said that, just as immunisation is a more effective strategy than treating the symptoms of disease, the primary objective in addressing child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) must be prevention.
Yet in the UK alone, Home Office research indicates that more than 1,000 times as much public funding is spent on dealing with the consequences of child abuse – after devastating damage to young lives has been done – than on preventing it in the first place.
Stanfield said: “Child sexual exploitation and abuse needs to be treated for what it is: a global public health emergency that occurs in every country, is growing year on year and requires a global response.
“This is a crisis of unimaginable scale yet all too often it remains unseen, unspoken and unprioritised. We cannot continue to respond to this emergency with the tools of the past – treating it as a niche issue for law enforcement or technology alone to manage. That approach has failed and children are paying the price.”
Stephen Kavanagh, ICMEC Secretary General, said: “Working together, collaborating across geographic borders, between different disciplines in law enforcement, education, social work and technology, we can and must fight this public health crisis.
“The children who are the victims are all our futures. We need to learn from how effective public health frameworks, such as responses to COVID, have been in the past. If we can reduce deaths from smoking or globally eradicate smallpox then we can also act decisively to stop child exploitation and abuse.”
The “Atlanta Declaration”, backed by over 30 health experts at the Bridging the Sciences conference, states that all forms of child sexual exploitation and abuse constitute “a global public health emergency, compromising the safety, development, and wellbeing of hundreds of millions of children annually”.
It says it is “time to respond with the urgency and coordination this crisis demands — through a prevention-oriented public health approach grounded in empirical evidence and multisectoral collaboration.”
A public health approach has proved effective in multiple complex global health challenges — from the eradication of smallpox and tackling COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS to significant reductions in tobacco use.
It involves global collaboration with analysis of high-quality data to fully understand the scale and nature of the problem, looking at the risk factors and the drivers, evaluating which interventions work. There is then a focus on how those interventions can be scaled up globally with funding to help more children.
This approach has been recognised and endorsed for application to CSEA by institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations, and other international bodies.
The Atlanta Declaration comes nearly 30 years after a World Health Assembly declaration that child sexual abuse is a public health issue. Supporters say that wider support for this approach would save billions in taxpayers money and prevent harm.
Professor Elena Martellozzo, director of Childlight’s European hub at Universitty of Edinburgh, highlighted multiple examples of promising preventive measures that are helping to tackle CSEA. These ranged from educational programmes for children, parents and carers to laws on internet safety. But she warned that for many governments it was still not a priority.
Supporters of the declaration hope it will act as a springboard, gathering momentum globally and helping persuade governments and other authorities to prioritise prevention measures.
Among the supporters are: Emilio Puccio, Secretary General of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children’s Rights, Sabine Rakotomalala, a senior technical adviser at the World Health Organization, Dr. Jain, Pediatrician in Chief at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Bernadette Madrid, Clinical Associate Professor of Child Protection Unit, University of the Philippines Manila, and Xiangming Fang, a professor of health economics at China Agricultural University and Georgia State University.
Childlight and ICMEC regard the move as the beginning of a new global push to mobilise evidence-informed, preventative action to safeguard children globally.
NOTES TO EDITORS
A photo of supporters of the declaration at the Emory University Conference Center, Atlanta is attached, along with photos of Paul Stanfield and Stephen Kavanagh.
Childlight is a global child safety data institute, hosted by the University of Edinburgh and University of New South Wales and established by Human Dignity Foundation. It utilises academic research expertise to better understand the nature and prevalence of child sexual exploitation and abuse to help inform policy responses to tackling it. Its purpose is to safeguard children across the world from sexual exploitation and abuse. Its vision is to have child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) recognised as a global health issue that can be prevented and treated. Its mission is to use the power of data to drive sustainable, co-ordinated action to safeguard children across the world; improve CSEA data, quality, integrity and reproducibility; and be recognised as the leading independent authority for global CSEA data. Childlight also draws on decades of law enforcement experience at a senior level. Its multi-disciplinary approach ensures not only the production of high-quality data insights but enables Childlight to help authorities around the world turn data into action to pinpoint and arrest perpetrators and safeguard children.
ICMEC is a non-governmental organisation working to make the world a safer place for all children by defending against child sexual exploitation, abuse, and the risk of going missing. Headquartered in the United States, ICMEC coordinates with partners around the world to develop research, technologies and educational resources to aid in the search and recovery of children who are missing, fight child sexual exploitation, and empower caring professionals, institutions, and communities to safeguard children from all forms of sexual abuse. For more information please visit www.icmec.org or contact ICMEC at information@icmec.org or +1-703-837-6313. For media enquiries please contact media@icmec.org .
A Home Office report put the lifetime costs relating to the consequences of children being sexually abuse in 2019 in England and Wales at £10.1 billion. These included costs for health care, police, court and victim support. In sharp contrast, only £7.8 million was estimated to be spent on prevention measures including educational programmes, offender prevention schemes and training costs. The Atlanta Declaration was agreed at the Bridging The Sciences conference June 2 and 3, 2025, hosted by the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University.