Artificial Intelligence and Child Sexual Exploitation: The Digitalisation of Harm

The growing circulation of artificial intelligence within the field of child protection has altered investigative practices and displaced the very terms through which exploitation is conceived, narrated and redressed. Behind the apparent neutrality of code and the precision of data lie older grammars of domination, animated by the classificatory impulse that has long sustained the relation between knowledge and control. What AI introduces, however, is not a rupture with these genealogies but a continuation under the sign of automation. In the name of protection, scrutiny of certain groups is intensified, and exposure becomes a condition of visibility without agency. In the field of child sexual trafficking, this transformation is particularly acute. The increase of algorithmic tools (predictive software, image-recognition systems, conversational avatars) promises to anticipate harm and neutralise its perpetrators. Yet these devices also reproduce a moral economy where vulnerability is defined, circulated and ultimately commodified. The image of endangered child, endlessly replicated by synthetic media, functions both as evidence and as artefact, collapsing the distinction between representation and violation. What emerges is the translation of exploitation into a new technological vernacular, the digitalisation of harm. This report argues that the deployment of AI in anti-trafficking contexts cannot be understood apart from the epistemic structures that authorise certain forms of violence while concealing others. In fact, AI operates as a tool that reorganises the conditions of perception: deciding who is seen, how, and for what purpose. It is in this sense that the digital struggle against trafficking appears less as an advance in humanitarian governance than as its mutation: a system in which the politics of rescue converges with the politics of control, and the vocabulary of protection masks the persistence of unequal regimes of visibility and voice. This work was submitted to the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls for their “Call for Inputs to the 2026 Thematic Report on Gender Equality, the Digital Space and the Age of Artificial Intelligence”.