CRIME NEWS - Roughly 95 000 CyberTipline reports were linked to suspected online child sexual exploitation in South Africa during 2025, according to The Citizen. The scale of the figure highlights how online exploitation has moved beyond occasional headlines and into the everyday reality of South African households.

This Women's Day month, mothers and daughters are facing a category of digital risk that did not exist a generation ago.

For Anna Collard, SVP of content strategy and CISO advisor at KnowBe4 Africa, the figure is a wake-up call rather than a surprise.

“Statistics like these show how important digital resilience has become for modern parents,” she says. “With the rise of AI and everything that comes with it, this can feel like an impossible task. But it isn't. Every parent can equip themselves and their children with the judgement to make sense of it.”

This generation's online risks look different

The online world young people face today looks very different from the one their parents grew up in.

Children are growing up with online risks their parents never had to consider, including deepfakes, AI-generated bullying, fake profiles, digital sextortion, voice cloning and a growing list of threats requiring vigilance.

Research from UNICEF South Africa shows that more than 95% of South African children are regularly online, while a lack of awareness about online dangers leaves many exposed to online violence, exploitation and harmful content.

South African courts are already dealing with this category of harm.

In May 2025, the Pietermaritzburg Regional Court sentenced a man to five years' direct imprisonment for superimposing sexual images onto photographs of public figures, including the President, and distributing them.

The victims in that case were adults, but the same fabricated, non-consensual imagery is increasingly being directed at children through AI tools.

AI-generated abuse disproportionately targets girls

Globally, the scale of the shift is concerning.

NCMEC's CyberTipline received 1.4 million reports of online enticement in 2025 – a broad category that includes sextortion – as well as more than 400 000 reports involving generative AI, up from about 67 000 the previous year.

The impact of this exploitation is also heavily gendered.

The Internet Watch Foundation found that girls accounted for 97% of the AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery it assessed in 2025.

Boys are not exempt, however. They are the primary targets of financial sextortion, where offenders pose as romantic interests, persuade teenagers to send explicit images and then demand money.

NCMEC received an average of 137 such reports a day in 2025, an increase of 37% from the previous year. The organisation is also aware of at least three dozen teenage boys in the United States who died by suicide after being targeted.

Digital resilience, therefore, is a lesson that sons need just as urgently as daughters.

Delay smartphone access, then build digital judgement

For younger children, Collard believes the answer really can be to wait.

She supports the approach of the Smartphone Free Childhood movement, a parent-led initiative active in more than 40 countries, including South Africa, which encourages families to delay giving children their own smartphones and unrestricted internet access.

A 2026 Institute for Fiscal Studies study found that in schools where at least one in five parents signed the pact, children's recorded mental-health needs fell by about 8%.

“Not handing a young child a smartphone isn't fear, it's proportionate judgement,” says Collard. “It's no different from not letting them wander around downtown Johannesburg alone at night.”

But delaying access only works for so long.

The internet does not stay switched off forever. Once a daughter is old enough to be online, constantly trying to lock everything down – banning apps or confiscating phones – can work against the very thing parents are trying to protect.

“When we respond to fear with control, we are not teaching a daughter how to navigate risk. We are only delaying the moment she encounters it without us,” says Collard.

“If the only lesson she has learned is that it's something to fear, she has no framework for what to do when something actually goes wrong.”

Teaching children to pause and question

From that point onwards, judgement becomes one of the most important tools for staying safe.

Children need to learn how to spot manipulation, question urgency and pause before trusting what they see online.

A household built entirely around suspicion can also make a daughter less likely to come forward if something goes wrong.

“She needs to know that manipulation can target anyone, and that speaking up is always the right move,” says Collard.

What South African parents can do

The digital threats are already here. Parents can adapt, just as previous generations adapted to new risks.

That starts with open conversations rather than relying solely on surveillance.

Instead of monitoring every message, parents can talk through real-life scenarios, including:

• How to identify a fake profile.
• Why messages that create a sense of urgency deserve a second look.
• How to verify whether someone online is who they claim to be.
• What to do if someone requests an inappropriate image.
• Why children should tell a trusted adult if they feel threatened, manipulated or uncomfortable.

Parents should also know where to report problems before a crisis occurs, so that neither they nor their children have to search for answers under pressure.

Organisations such as Childline South Africa and NCMEC's Take It Down service provide resources and support for dealing with online exploitation and harmful content.

Above all, communication channels need to remain open enough for a child to tell a parent what has happened without fearing that they will automatically lose their phone or privacy as punishment for being targeted.

Building digital resilience at home

For parents looking for a starting point, KnowBe4's CAPY (Cyber Awareness Program for You) hub provides free resources covering topics such as protecting children online, securing family devices and identifying scams targeting other members of the household.

The aim is to improve the digital literacy of the entire family, rather than focusing only on children.

“The judgement we help build in our daughters at home is the same judgement they will carry into every digital environment they enter later in life, including the workplace,” Collard concludes.

“Raising a digitally resilient daughter isn't a separate project from securing a digitally resilient workforce. It's the same skill, just taught a lot earlier.”

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