Help sweep child abuse off the net

The battle to remove images and videos of child abuse from the internet has had a successful year, according to a report issued today (21st April) by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Often men who are charged with watching abuse on the internet claim this is not a serious crime and is not as bad as directly abusing children. This is a complete nonsense: the real, live children are being abused in these pictures and videos, and the watchers are causing these children to be abused every bit as much as if they were doing it in person.

Up to 2014, the IWF’s work consisted of following up complaints made by members of the public, but in that year it was given the power to instigate its own investigations and check the internet for problems itself. As a result, in 2015 the IWF was able to remove nearly images of illegal child sex abuse from 70,000 sites on the internet – more than double the sites it took action against the year before. Each site could host anything between one and 1,000 images.

Susie Hargreaves, IWF’s Chief Executive, explained, “Thanks to a co-ordinated approach from government and our internet industry Members, our work is having an incredible impact. But despite our success, this isn’t the time to stand still. We’ve got ambitious plans to expand our team of analysts. What we never forget is that behind these headlines and every single image we remove from the internet – there is a real child being abused.”

Trying to minimise their crimes, abusers sometimes claim that child abuse on the internet is not really child abuse and is just images of teenagers who are nearly adult, or that what is depicted being done to the children is not that serious. The IWF report shows this claim is without foundation. Horrifically, nearly two thirds of victims in the images were assessed as being aged ten or under – with 1,788 babies and toddlers also being featured in the removed material. One third of the material removed was classed as “category A”, involving rape or torture of children.

When the IWF was founded, 20 years ago, it was estimated that nearly one fifth of child sexual abuse imagery was hosted in the UK: that is now down to 0.2%, with the UK being seen as a world-leader in hunting down and removing illegal images.

The work of the IWF is clearly very welcome – but two problems remain on how the UK is tackling this kind of child abuse.

First, the IWF is a charity and it does rely on donations from the public. It is entirely wrong that the body doing this work on behalf of the whole country is not fully funded out of general taxation.

Second, we need a second body which can work to find ways of creating a society in which watching or committing abuse is not acceptable and in which there are fewer perpetrators of abuse and fewer people who feel it is acceptable or desirable to create this kind of material or watch it.

•To read the full report, find out more about the work of IWF and make a donation towards funding it, go to:
www.iwf.org.uk

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