From TikTok Lives and Instagram broadcasts to Twitch gaming streams, livestreaming has quickly become a core feature of modern social media platforms. While these platforms market connection and creativity, they have also become a uniquely modern accelerator of the commercial sexual exploitation of minors. Accessible to anyone with a smartphone and internet connection, this feature’s vast reach allows traffickers and sex-buyers to exploit children in real-time.
Livestreaming child sexual exploitation (LCSE) occurs when “an offender compels a child victim to engage in sexually explicit conduct during a broadcast, in real time, to one or more viewers.” This form of exploitation often involves two offenders playing distinct roles. Typically, one abuser pays to view, and in some cases actively direct the abuse, while another facilitates the exploitation by arranging the livestream. In many cases, this is facilitated by trusted adults, including family members, which only magnifies the psychological harm to victims through confusion, betrayal, and conflicting ideas of loyalty. Sex buyers often negotiate payment and specific sexual acts in advance and use wire transfers to exchange currency, hindering law enforcement’s ability to trace the transaction. The added insulation from detection makes this form of exploitation even more attractive to those who both facilitate and consume the abuse.
The two parties typically communicate through mainstream messaging and social media platforms to schedule sessions in advance and negotiate payment. During the livestream, the child is coerced or pressured into performing sexual acts, sometimes through promises or incentives, often unfolding according to real-time instructions from the paying viewer. As a result, social media livestreaming services and encrypted messaging applications have become powerful tools for offenders seeking direct access to children with minimal oversight or intervention.
This same broad, technological accessibility also allows livestreamed exploitation to operate on a global scale. Individuals with minimal resources can participate from virtually anywhere in the world, which effectively dismantles geographic barriers that once limited traditional forms of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This implicates multiple state and national legal systems, limiting legal cohesion and creating jurisdictional challenges that complicate investigation and hinder prosecution.
Unlike traditional CSAM, which produces traditional files that can be traced and seized, livestreamed content often leaves no permanent record. The videos effectively disappear the moment the livestream ends because, in most cases, the livestream itself is not saved by the platform. This makes detection and documentation notably difficult for law enforcement agencies, especially considering that so few social media companies are willing or able to adequately monitor their platforms and detect LCSE. Moreover, the sheer number of streaming services makes LCSE easy to hide and difficult to locate. Without direct reports from a platform or a third party, law enforcement agencies generally have no practical way to even discover that a crime transpired, let alone to locate and prosecute offenders.
Livestreaming technology has created an easily-accessible and largely overlooked form of child sexual exploitation. The immediacy and anonymity of livestreaming allows offenders to exploit children in real time through a process that largely evades detection and legal repercussions.
In response to these escalating risks, lawmakers have begun to reevaluate the legal framework that governs the online ecosystem, with many calling for clearer and more enforceable standards of accountability. Efforts to reconsider Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, most notably through the proposed Sunset Section 230 Act, reflect bipartisan frustration with the low standards of accountability afforded to tech companies. The Kids Online Safety Act, first introduced in February of 2022, would function similarly by requiring platforms to exercise reasonable care in implementing online safeguards to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse of minors. Pennsylvania Attorney General, Dave Sunday, has expressed support for the legislation declaring it is an opportunity for “Congress…to put children first.” These current proposals, coupled with the recently enacted Take It Down Act which establishes removal requirements and criminal penalties for the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery, display a shift in the current legal framework surrounding online child exploitation.
While the reforms are still evolving, they do represent an important step toward greater acknowledgment of digital exploitation, the need for increased accountability, and prospective concrete action. With this being said, however, combating this growing form of abuse will undoubtedly require even stronger coordination among law enforcement agencies and greater accountability from social media companies. Without continued action, livestreaming features will only continue to extend beyond their intended purpose, remaining direct conduits of harm to minors.
This piece is part of our first-year law student blog series. Congratulations to author Tiernan McEwen on being chosen!
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.