Online child sexual exploitation (OCSE)

Survey research suggests that only approximately 7 percent of teen victims who experience any form of technology-facilitated sexual violence report their experience to police.1 It should be noted that this 7 percent figure is a blended rate across all TFSV types, heavily influenced by the high frequency of less-severe forms such as unwanted sexual messages, which are almost never reported. For the most serious contact offences and OCSE incidents — which form the UCR incidence base used in this section — reporting rates are likely materially higher, consistent with Statistics Canada's broader sexual assault victimization research suggesting 15 to 33 percent2 of serious sexual offences come to police attention. The UCR figures should therefore be understood as a significant undercount of true incidence, but a less severe undercount for serious offences than the blended 7 percent rate would imply.

The true annual scale of serious OCSE affecting Canadian children and youth nonetheless remains far greater than police-reported figures capture.

OCSE encompasses a range of serious harms including online child sexual abuse and exploitation material (OCSAEM), sextortion, grooming, and technology-facilitated contact offences. Canadian police services reported 3,327 child sexual exploitation violations in 2022 (Statistics Canada UCR). The Canadian Centre for Child Protection received 26,490 reports of suspected OCSAEM in 2022 alone.3

Health system costs

The mental health treatment burden of OCSE is estimated from prevalence and treatment utilization data. An estimated 150,000 to 300,000 Canadian youth are meaningfully affected by technology-facilitated sexual violence annually, drawing on the Digitally Informed Youth (Nau et al., 2025) prevalence estimate and serious-harm sub-population scaling from Statistics Canada's UCR and C3P data. Applying a 12 percent treatment-seeking rate (consistent with reporting to a friend, school official or police) and a $5,000 to $15,000 range of treatment cost (assuming an average of $8,000) — consistent with CIHI paediatric mental health utilization data and intensive CBT and in-patient therapy — the direct mental health treatment cost is estimated at $145 million to $290 million annually.

Quality-of-life losses

Using the same QALY framework applied in the self-harm category, and drawing on meta-analytic QALY decrements for child sexual abuse survivors (typically 0.25 to 0.40 per year for the first decade post-victimization, consistent with EQ-5D utility weights for severe PTSD and complex trauma),4 applied to an estimated 18,000 to 36,000 youth experiencing serious OCSE victimization annually — the most seriously affected sub-group within the broader affected population — yields $225 million to $720 million in quality-of-life losses annually. We further assume that the remaining 132,000 to 264,000 Canadian youth meaningfully affected by OCSE experience milder welfare impacts (sub-clinical distress, mild anxiety, mild PTSD features) at a QALY decrement of 0.05 per affected youth-year, yielding additional welfare losses of $330 million to $660 million annually. Combined, total OCSE-related quality-of-life losses are estimated at approximately $555 million to $1.4 billion annually.

It should be noted that the 0.25 to 0.40 QALY decrement applies exclusively to the serious sub-group of 18,000 to 36,000 — not to the full 150,000 to 300,000 youth who experience any form of technology-facilitated sexual violence. The broader affected population of 132,000 to 264,000 youth beyond the serious sub-group are assigned the substantially lower 0.05 QALY decrement consistent with sub-clinical impacts.

Justice system costs

Drawing on Justice Canada's updated cost-per-case methodology for sexual offence proceedings — including investigation, prosecution, court, and corrections costs5 — and applying it to the estimated volume of cases proceeding through the justice system, the annual justice system burden from OCSE is estimated at $90 million to $165 million annually.

Mental health costs of victimization

The long-term mental health burden of OCSE is among the most severe of any harm category. Drawing on Canadian clinical literature on trauma-specialized mental health treatment and CIHI data on specialist service utilization by youth survivors of sexual violence, this component is captured within the mental health treatment cost estimate above.

The online sexual violence category total is $790 million to $1.9 billion annually.