Supporting EU Policy Goals through the Universal Classification Schema
23. Sep. 2025
The European Union is advancing an ambitious regulatory agenda to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation online. Through the Digital Services Act, the proposed Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse, and the forthcoming recast of the 2011 Directive on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children, the EU is strengthening its legal and operational framework to support detection, removal, and reporting of illegal content. At the heart of this effort lies a clear challenge: how to ensure consistent understanding and action across diverse systems, services, and jurisdictions.
The Universal Classification Schema offers a practical and scalable solution. It provides a shared language for classifying child sexual abuse material that can be used across law enforcement systems, hotlines, platforms, and regulators. By aligning terminology and categories, the Schema enables faster, clearer, and more coordinated responses to child sexual abuse across the digital ecosystem.
Under the Digital Services Act, very large online platforms (VLOPS) and other intermediary services are required to identify and mitigate systemic risks, including those related to illegal content. The DSA also formalises the role of trusted flaggers, who must submit reports in a structured and reliable format, and obliges platforms to implement clear procedures for moderation, transparency reporting, and escalation. Tools that incorporate the Schema can support these requirements by offering:
- structured categories that platforms and trusted flaggers can use,
- to classify and escalate content in a consistent way.
This ensures that reports submitted to platforms are understandable, traceable, and actionable, regardless of where the flag originates or which platform receives it.
The Schema also supports the generation of high quality, structured data that can feed into transparency reports and systemic risk assessments. These reporting obligations require more than statistics. They call for data that shows how content is assessed and responded to over time. By applying Schema categories to detection systems, moderation logs, and escalation workflows, platforms can create more meaningful datasets that support compliance while improving outcomes for children.
The proposed Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse introduces a new set of detection, reporting, and removal obligations for service providers, along with a central role for the newly created EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse. Under this Regulation, providers will be required to detect known and new child sexual abuse material, report it in a standardised way, and cooperate with both the EU Centre and national authorities.
The Schema can serve as the underlying classification model for AI based detection tools, enabling providers to train models using consistent and legally grounded labels. It also ensures that reports sent to the EU Centre use categories that are interoperable across jurisdictions, supporting triage and coordination with law enforcement.