Save the Children Finland’s Child Protection and Finnish Hotline’s Annual Report 2023 has been published. In 2023, a total of 22,584 reports were handled by the Finnish Hotline. Of these, 9399 were received via reporting forms and 13,185 were processed within the proactive work of the Finnish Hotline.


One emerging trend was sextortion (a combination of sex and extortion), which refers to blackmail with sexually explicit material previously taken and sent by a person. In 2023, the Finnish Hotline received 16 reports of extortion using sexually explicit images, 14 of which involved a child. In the previous year, there were no such reports involving children. The National Bureau of Investigation’s CSE team has also noticed an increase in the phenomenon. In 2023, the number of sextortion cases in Finland will have more than doubled compared to the previous year, according to statistics compiled by the NBI.

Some of the Finnish Hotline’s analysts offer their expertise in analysing material for Project Arachnid. In 2023, the Finnish Hotline analysed 444,447 images in Project Arachnid. Of these, 293,078 images were assessed as illegal and 38,668 as potentially illegal. Project Arachnid is an artificial intelligence tool to remove child sexual abuse material from the internet. It is run by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P), which also trains all analysts using the system.


Access the full Annual Report.