NCMEC on the Hill: “Online child exploitation escalating, more violent”

Children in every community in this country are regularly being sexually exploited online with new and more extreme measures used to control, degrade and torture them, Lauren Coffren, an executive director with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) testified on Capitol Hill this week. 

At Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Protecting our Children Online from Evolving Predators,” Coffren shared insights into three of the most egregious ways we’ve ever seen being used to exploit children as young as 12: financial sextortion, sadistic exploitation and generative artificial intelligence (GAI).  

“This exploitation will not stop until Congress passes laws that close legal gaps, incentivize companies to adopt safety by design and provide essential tools to better protect children,” Coffren said.

Through our work with the CyberTipline, NCMEC is uniquely positioned to spot trends on the internet impacting children and is leading the conversation in this country and around the world as the abuse escalates and becomes more violent. This week, NCMEC testified at two Congressional hearings about the urgency of evolving threats.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, we’ve witnessed dramatic increases in these new forms of abuse. Our CyberTipline, the centralized mechanism in the U.S. for reporting online child sexual exploitation, received more than 20 million reports last year, most pertaining to child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The committee was particularly taken by testimony from Tamia Woods, the mother of 17-year-old James, a dynamic teenager who took his life after being financially sextorted. The online exploitation lasted 19½ hours and involved 400 messages before he felt that suicide was his only option, his mother said.

After her son’s death three years ago, Woods co-founded a foundation, “Do it for James,” and began working with NCMEC’s Team Hope to support other families. She told the committee that education is key, and although it’s too late to save her son, “if I can save your grandchildren, I’m going to do it.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked the witnesses if phones are more dangerous than cigarettes. All three responded yes.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) directed a question to all three witnesses – Coffren, Woods and Jessica Lieber Smolar, former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, who has prosecuted many of these cases.

 "Do you all agree that we've as a nation miserably failed our children – that we have hearings and we talk, [but] we've

done very little to protect them?" Graham asked. They emphatically agreed. "That's a damning indictment of all of us,” he said. They also agreed with him that “phones are more dangerous than cigarettes.”

The harshest criticism from senators was directed toward social media companies. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said online platforms are hiding behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects them from being held liable for content posted on their sites.

They have a firm grip on Congress, Hawley said, and legislators might as well plant a “Property of Big Tech” sign at the Capitol for keeping Section 230 intact.

Asked by several senators why these new violent groups want to create chaos, Coffren said child sexual exploitation has been “hijacked” as a way to create shock and awe, so these loosely formed groups can achieve clout and notoriety.

Lieber Smolar and Coffren said that while laws have not kept pace with these evolving crimes, some new laws have had impact, including the Take it Down Act, which helps victims remove explicit images from the internet and takes away the power offenders have over their targets when they threaten to share their explicit images online and ruin their lives.

The REPORT Act is already helping close the gap that existed in protecting children from GAI-produced CSAM and deep fakes, and by making it mandatory for social media companies to report online enticement to us.

Before the hearing, Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-Ill) introduced three bipartisan bills to hold violent criminals accountable and combat the disturbing rise in online child exploitation.

Melissa Snow, executive director of NCMEC’s Child Sex Trafficking Programs, said using innovative tools to fight trafficking is “life saving.”

On Wednesday, at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, legislators also heard that The REPORT Act is having an impact on reporting child sex trafficking.

Melissa Snow, executive director of NCMEC’s Child Sex Trafficking Programs, testified at the “Using Modern Tools to Counter Human Trafficking” hearing that the new law is exposing the pervasiveness of child sex trafficking across online platforms.

Because online platforms were not required to report child sex trafficking prior to the REPORT Act, we had not seen the volume of reports that would reflect the true magnitude of child sex trafficking online, Snow said. 

In 2023, one year before it was enacted, online platforms voluntarily submitted 8,480 reports relating to child sex trafficking to NCMEC, Snow said. In the first 11 months of 2025 (the first full year in effect), online platforms submitted an astounding 98,489 reports, she said.

Snow said child sex trafficking is a complex, technology-facilitated online crime, but technology is also crucial for combating it. Every day we use donated, specialized anti-trafficking tools such as Traffick Jam and Spotlight to search missing child data and photos against online escort ads.

Another tool, Traffic Cam, allows us to use a search feature to identify hotel rooms where child sex trafficking victims have been photographed.

“Using these innovative tools is life saving when we can connect a missing child to an active online escort ad advertising that child for sale in a specific city, and it’s even more powerful when we can narrow it to a specific hotel,” Snow said. “Being able to pass along a lead that is actionable for law enforcement can mean significantly reducing the amount of time that child is experiencing a nightmare.”