Through the Tech Coalition, industry leaders are coming together to reduce risk, improve response, and design safer tools and platforms to better protect children from abuse and exploitation in online gaming.
Abuse and exploitation in gaming
Gaming environments often encourage real-time interaction between players, making platforms vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) in gaming can include:
- Sharing or storing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) through in-game content (e.g. chats, avatars, profile photos) or the game’s cloud or file hosting solution. Perpetrators can also post URLs to where CSAM is hosted off-platform.
- Grooming children, building trust to manipulate and exploit them.
- Financial sextortion, where children are coerced into sharing explicit or compromising images and videos, then threaten to release them unless payment is made.
- Live-streaming child abuse using integrated or linked platforms.
Prevention and early detection of abuse are critical to protect young gamers and stop harm escalating.
Protecting children in gaming environments
To get started preventing and responding to OCSEA on gaming platforms, companies can:
- Establish external standards prohibiting OCSEA, and implement internal child safety policies that outline how to identify and take action on potential OCSEA.
- Surface cases by building proactive detection and in-game user reporting.
- Take action when OCSEA is identified by reporting cases to local authorities and acting on involved accounts (e.g. content removal, account termination, and / or a ban of a player’s device and / or console).
- Prepare for follow-up from law enforcement. Reports to local authorities may lead to investigations; be ready to respond to legal requests that can help protect victims and enable law enforcement to collect the necessary evidence against the perpetrator.
- Integrate Safety by Design principles to reduce risks upfront by embedding child safety protections in product development from the start.
For more information, please see the Combating Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Gaming Guide in Thriving in Games Group’s Digital Playbook.
Industry collaborating to combat OCSEA in gaming
Through the Tech Coalition, industry is collaborating to improve the detection and prevention of OCSEA in gaming. Together, we’re creating an ecosystem where safety by design, threat intelligence, and cross-sector collaboration drive real impact.
Sharing and testing solutions
- Our Gaming Sector Roadmap for members outlines principles and strategies for addressing OCSEA in gaming.
- Tech Coalition members meet regularly to discuss emerging trends, challenges, and solutions through a knowledge sharing group dedicated to combating OCSEA in gaming.
- Lantern, our cross-platform signal-sharing program, enables gaming companies to identify and act on grooming and OCSEA threat indicators.
Producing practical resources
The Tech Coalition contributed to the Digital Thriving Playbook to outline how gaming companies can recognize, take action, and prevent OCSEA on their platforms.porting independent, actionable research on topics from youth engagement with AI to the misuse of generative AI to produce CSAM.
Resources and support
For those experiencing or witnessing abuse in gaming environments, support is available across the world. The following resources provide additional information and tools for responding to and reporting OCSEA:
- Know2Protect is a U.S. Department of Homeland Security initiative that provides children, teens, and parents with information about recognizing and reporting online enticement.
- INHOPE provides global information about child safety in gaming, as well as access to hotlines across the world where incidents can be reported.
- The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Take it Down service helps remove nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos taken of minors from the internet.
- The Children’s Society provides an explainer to parents about risks in gaming platforms and how to recognize signs of exploitation.
Why join the Tech Coalition?
No company should have to face these threats alone. Our members benefit from:
- Access to industry insights and shared learnings
- Opportunities to collaborate through working groups
- First access to new child safety tools and resources
- Collective influence on safety standards
Join our global community of child safety professionals from tech companies – big and small – working together to combat child sexual exploitation in online gaming.
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