The Netherlands is Europe’s top offender when it comes to hosting online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), a new report has found.
Over 60% of all online CSAM in Western Europe is hosted by the Netherlands, according to a report from the Global Child Safety Institute, Childlight.
Childlight, based at the University of Edinburgh, has found that the Netherlands isn’t just the top offender in Europe, but is also responsible for 30% of the world’s CSAM content.
There are also extremely high levels of CSAM in countries like Lithuania, Slovakia, and Luxembourg, Childlight reveals.
Using data from the internet hotline, INHOPE, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Cybertipline, Childlight shows that there are incredibly high levels of CSAM in these countries.
In 2024, there were over 880 cases of CSAM per 10,000 people in the Netherlands. Slovakia followed with over 193 cases, then Lithuania with 190, and Luxembourg with more than 186.
These countries showed a considerably higher number of CSAM cases than San Marino (5.4 cases) and Andorra (12.9).
CSAM refers to content that depicts minors, anyone below 18 years old, in a sexualized manner or engaging in sexual activity.
This content comes in the form of photos, videos, digital media, or artificially generated images.
Cybernews has previously reported on cases where perpetrators have used artificial intelligence (AI) to create violent, sexual images of children.
A US soldier, Seth Herrera, allegedly transported, received, and possessed media of children in violent sexual situations. Herrera also used AI chatbots to create images of children he knew.
Another man, Steven Anderegg, allegedly used the popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion to generate sexually explicit images of minors.
What is Europe doing about the CSAM epidemic?
Governing bodies in Europe are trying to mitigate the proliferation of CSAM via methods that many have thought invasive and borderline draconian.
The European Commission discussed a proposed framework to combat CSAM, which had many people enraged.
The idea, known as Chat Control, is the European Commission’s outline for combating CSAM. It mentions the potential to scan text messages and chats for such content.
The proposal mentions that “the detection process is generally speaking the most intrusive one for users since it requires automatically scanning through texts in interpersonal communications.”
This could mean that European governments could obtain access to information from digital service providers operating in Europe, like popular social media sites and messaging apps such as WhatsApp.
The encrypted messaging app Signal, commonly used by criminals, has threatened to pull out of the European market if Chat Control is passed.
“If we were given the choice of either undermining the integrity of our encryption and our data protection guarantees or leaving Europe, we would unfortunately decide to leave the market,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker told German news agency DPA.
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