Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025

The Drawing the Line Watchlist exposes a disturbing global trend: as prosecutions for victimless “virtual” offences rise, real child abuse cases are being left behind. In the United Kingdom, newly released data show that prosecutions for real child sexual abuse images have fallen by more than half since 2017, even as cases involving purely fictional or AI-generated material have surged to nearly 40% of all image offences. Other countries, like Australia, don’t even distinguish between the two categories—hiding the same pattern in their official statistics. The result is clear: resources are being diverted away from protecting real children, and toward punishing thought and imagination. From the imprisonment of a teenage artist in Costa Rica to the expanding surveillance regimes of Europe, Drawing the Line reveals how moral panic is distorting justice—and why the world urgently needs to rethink how it defines harm.