Australia’s digital duty of care bill needs these three changes to tackle online child sexual exploitation

On September 10, the Australian Federal Police announced the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received 100,194 reports of online child sexual exploitation in 2025–26 .

That is about 275 a day – a 21% rise over the year before, and up from 36,600 four years ago.

Read as a measure of how much abuse Australian children are suffering, the figure is alarming.

But it’s not an accurate measure.

It’s primarily the count of reports made by companies who chose to look for harm occurring on their platforms.

This figure is a floor for the harm occurring online.

Two days earlier, the federal government released an exposure draft of its long-awaited digital duty of care bill .

The bill would make platforms responsible for a “safe online environment”.

But if passed in its current form, it would not require platforms to look for online harms, nor to tell anyone in Australia what they find if they do.

Where the 100,000 reports come from According to the Australian Federal Police , most of the reports of online child sexual exploitation come primarily from the United States National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with the rest from the public and government agencies.

The US centre runs the CyberTipline which received 21.3 million reports in 2025.

Some 317 companies made them, and five tech companies made more than three-quarters of the total: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp and Google.

The global reports to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children grouped by the category of activity of the electronic service provider, showing the growth between 2024 and 2025.

Author supplied Analysts from the US centre determine which country each report relates to, usually based on the computer’s IP address, and pass it on.