Experts said 11-15 year-olds were copying celebrity idols who were frequently sharing naked selfies
Almost one in three reported child abuse images are now taken by the children themselves, new figures from the Internet Watch Foundation show.
Children are increasingly filming or photographing themselves in explicit situations and sharing the footage, which then ends up on adult pornography sites or shared by paedophiles, the foundation's annual report found.
The report shows that there were 78,589 confirmed child sexual abuse URLs found in 2017, up from 57,335 in 2016.
A growing number of images discovered by the foundation’s staff were those which children had taken themselves as photos or via livestreaming apps.
The number of cases which involved "self-generated" content rose from 349 in January 2017 to 1,717 a year later, rising from six per cent of the total in January 2017 to 26 per cent in January 2018.
The average proportion of images discovered between November and February which were self-generated was 31 per cent, rising to a high of 40 per cent in December, according to figures seen by the Daily Telegraph.
"We increasingly see more imagery of 11-15 year olds in what is termed “self-produced” content created using webcams and then shared online. This can have serious repercussions for young people and we take this trend very seriously," the report said.
Experts said 11-15 year-olds were copying celebrity idols who were frequently sharing naked selfies.
Stupid, stupid celebrity idols!
Children are reportedly copying celebrities, like Kim Kardashian, by uploading naked selfies online CREDIT: LOIC VENANCE/AFP
Fred Langford, deputy CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation said: "They're exposed to people who are doing this and yet they're being told not to do it. These are people they aspire to be in the future.
"It's a very difficult thing to say 'don't act like your heroes'. The normalisation of this in the adult population is just being mirrored by kids," he told the Daily Telegraph.
In many cases children were taking the images to share with friends and they were then being aggregated by paedophiles who add them to dedicated websites, he added.
"The increased prevalence of devices with cameras on makes things very very easy to share, and lots of the sharing apps will automatically upload content unless someone realises and changes their settings themselves."
"There are groups of people who harvest and seek out this sort of content to generate a page in itself, a central point where all this material has been harvested."
The report also found that paedophiles were increasingly technologically savvy, with rising numbers of images hidden in disguised websites, and only accessible via a specific pathway.
"When the pathway is not followed, or the website is accessed directly through a browser, legal content is displayed.
"This means it is more difficult to locate and investigate the illegal imagery," the report said.
Abusers were also using custom domain names to hide images, the report said. In 2017, the IWF uncovered 2,909 websites which were using this method to hide child sexual abuse images, an increase of 86 per cent on the 1,572 disguised websites identified in 2016.
The number of child sexual abuse website “brands” rose by 112 per cent.
Category A content, which includes the rape and sexual torture of children, made up more of the images and videos found, growing from 28 per cent of all content to 33 per cent.
Susie Hargreaves OBE, IWF CEO, said: “We are now receiving more reports of child sexual abuse content than ever before. This year we’re seeing offenders getting smarter and finding new ways to abuse legitimate internet services."
“Our trends analysis tracks this development. It’s concerning that offenders appear to be increasingly using concealed digital pathways to prevent law enforcement and hotlines around the world detecting these criminal websites.”
An NSPCC spokesman said: “It’s clear that paedophiles are using increasingly sophisticated ways to offend at a mass scale. The use of disguised websites and the dark web are fuelling the growth of this terrible crime.
“The sheer scale and complexity of the problem is evolving rapidly in line with technology, so it’s impossible to simply police our way out of the problem, we need a comprehensive strategy to stop potential offenders in their tracks."
The IWF is a charity which searches for and identifies child abuse images online to get them taken down.
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