Alex Hern 

Charity steps up efforts to hunt down child sexual abuse images

Internet Watch Foundation has tripled number of staff weeding out the imagery as reliance on public reports is reduced
  
  

ed vaizey
Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, says the IWF is in a better position to proactively search for abusive material. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian Photograph: Sarah Lee/Guardian

The Internet Watch Foundation, the charity charged with reporting and removing child sexual abuse images, has begun proactively seeking out criminal content, reducing its dependency on reports from the public.

Thanks to funding from Google and many of the biggest UK ISPs, the foundation has tripled the number of staff engaged in seeking out such imagery.

"I'm very pleased that we have got to the position now where the IWF can now proactively search for abusive material," said Ed Vaizey, the culture minister. "That's a significant shift in the way the IWF goes about its business."

"It's a huge undertaking for the IWF. It's required increasing the number of analysts they have to deliver that work," Vaizey added. Last year's Downing Street-organised summit on tackling child abuse images online led to increased funding from the telecoms industry, allowing the organisation to treble the number of analysts working on tracking down such material.

The foundation operates a hotline which members of the public can call to report suspected child abuse imagery. In 2013, 51,186 reports were processed, and over a quarter were confirmed as containing criminal material within the foundation's remit.

But the work is arduous, and manually performed by a small team of specialists. "We open the reports, view what they viewed, and make an assessment on it," said an IWF analyst. "If it is child sexual abuse content, then we're looking at the age of the child, and we grade the images depending on what is happening.

"Until now, we've been restricted to responding to what people report to us, and we were restricted to going just one click away," she continued. "Quite often, we'll come across a report where you can keep clicking links and links and links, and you get no end of content."

Susie Hargreaves, IWF chief executive, said that the expanded remit came as a result of the government's focus on child abuse imagery in 2013. "We said if we were able to proactively seek it, because we're experts and we know what we're looking for, we'd be able to expand our reach hugely. We've done it for three days now, and already, each day, we've found three times more content."

The IWF operates under a memorandum of understanding from the Association of Chief Police Officers, which provides it with protection from the legal consequences of accessing child abuse images. It was initially thought that the memorandum would have to be altered before the foundation could adopt its enhanced remit, but an examination of the legal basis of the organisation conducted by Lord Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, revealed otherwise.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*