Internet Watch Foundation CEO says a heavy dose of reality is needed over the amount of child sexual abuse content on our open internet as millions of abusive images were found and removed last year.
A record number of reports of online child sexual abuse have been processed by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation amid “shock” that the availability of illegal content online could still be increasing on the open internet.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK charity responsible for finding and removing images and videos of child sexual abuse from the internet, processed more than a quarter of a million reports in 2019.
Last year, IWF analysts processed 260,400 reports, which include tip offs from members of the public. This is up from 229,328 reports in 2018. This is an increase of 14%.
Of these reports, 132,700 showed images and/or videos of children being sexually abused. This compares to 105,047 reports of child sexual abuse material in 2018 – an increase of 26%. Every report contains between one, and thousands of child sexual abuse images and videos. This equates to millions of images and videos.
IWF CEO Susie Hargreaves OBE said: “What’s really shocking is that it’s all available on the open internet, or ‘clear web’. That’s the everyday internet that we all use to do our shopping, search for information, and obtain our news. Obviously, we know there’s child sexual abuse content on the dark web but right now it’s really a case of saying “we’ve got to get a grip on the epidemic on our open internet”.
