IWF reports global decrease in child sexual abuse websites

For anyone who doesn't know, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a UK self-regulatory body, funded by the internet industry and the EU, operating a national hotline for public reports of criminal internet content (http://www.iwf.org.uk/) and providing a notice and take-down service to companies offering web hosting services in the UK. Since 1996 it has dealt with more than 200,000 reports and has over 12 years’ experience of tracking and understanding the technologies and behaviour behind the sites.

The IWF today published its Annual Report 2008, revealing a fall of nearly 10% in the number of international websites with child sexual abuse content. The report warns against complacency, pointing to the serious nature of the images which are often carried on commercial websites. It also highlights the fact that 74% of child sexual abuse domains traced by IWF are commercial operations selling indecent images of children, and 75% of the these (some 850 unique domains) are registered with just 10 domain name registries. This underlines the importance of recent international efforts with domain name registries to get the site names delisted, and will remain a focus of IWF attention going forward.

Other trends are revealed in the report:

• 58% of child sexual abuse domains traced contain graphic images involving penetration or torture (47% of domains in 2007)


• 69% of the children appear to be 10 years old or younger; 24% 6 or under, and 4% 2 or under (80% appeared to be 10 or under in 2007)


• 74% of child sexual abuse domains traced are commercial operations, selling images (80% commercial in 2007)


• It is still rare to trace child sexual abuse content to hosts in the UK (under 1%).

In 2008:

• IWF issued 59 notices, in partnership with UK police forces, to UK internet service providers or host companies to take down potentially illegal content hosted on UK networks


• IWF provided specific data and intelligence to 22 police forces and agencies throughout the UK in support of potential prosecutions.


• There was a 3% decrease in reports processed by IWF Hotline, to approximately 34,000.


• There was a 9% decrease since 2007 and a 21% decrease since 2006, in the number of domains confirmed to contain indecent images of children (1536).

You can download the IWF report here .

Lord Stephen Carter CBE, Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, welcomed the report, “I have followed the IWF’s work for many years and continue to be impressed by the breadth of its industry support and by the range of UK industry-led tactics to combat child sexual abuse content online which have impacted so positively around the world. Effective, widely supported self-regulation is not a simple formula. For the IWF it requires commitment to a range of stakeholder demands, public interest concerns, international political pressures, and technological evolution and I congratulate them on their achievements.”

The greatest challenge remains the global nature of the online distribution of child sexual abuse images. The IWF is convinced that only concerted international law enforcement action, in partnership with Hotlines, can tackle the remaining core of sites.

The IWF suggests five ways to tackle this global problem:

1. Public/private partnership involving service providers working through a system of self-regulation


2. National notice and take-down schemes to remove criminal online content quickly


3. Promotion of filtering services to prevent accidental access to websites containing child sexual abuse content


4. Partnership with domain name registries to delist domain names that sell child sexual abuse images


5. Sharing data, intelligence and tactics internationally to combat the cross-border nature of these crimes

Along with many other interested parties, I was at the House of Commons for the launch of the report, and was dismayed to discover that the IWF is staffed by just 15 people (including the poor image analysts) and operates on an annual budget of just £1 million. They really have made a remarkable difference in an area which can only grow more and more complex as the online world expands. eModeration have been a member of the IWF since March 2007 , and are proud to support them by not only doing our jobs - pulling down child abuse images and reporting to the relevant authorities - but by publicising the work of the IWF to the internet industry and the public.

Lord Carter said (and I quote) "This hasn't been an early or senior enough issue .... we need a protection regime which works". But the question is - will the government invest in it?