Offlimits, an expertise center focused on online abuse in the Netherlands, revealed that 85 percent of this self-produced content came from children under the age of 12. A significant portion of those children were between 7 and 10 years old.

How It Starts — and Why It's Getting Worse
The pattern usually begins innocently enough.

A child picks up a phone or tablet and lands on a platform like TikTok, believing they are chatting with someone their own age. Before long, they are guided — sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully — to other platforms where things take a darker turn.

Madeleine van der Bruggen, deputy director of Offlimits, has watched this trend grow with deep concern.

She spent years working in law enforcement and says this wasn't something they encountered a decade ago. Children are being seduced or pressured into sending nude images at ages when they have no real understanding of sexuality. "They often don't even interpret it sexually," she noted.

"Later they do."

Once an image is sent, it rarely ends there. Children are blackmailed into sending more, trapped in a cycle they don't fully understand and cannot easily escape.

Therapists working with affected children report that many come from backgrounds involving abuse or family violence, though that is not always the case. What is consistent, however, is the disruption this causes to normal c.