Child Sexual Abuse Victims Going Undetected Because of 70,000 ‘False Reports’ in 2018

ELLENA CRUSE 
Evening Standard

More than 77,000 false reports about child sexual abuse were made last year, meaning thousands of real cases could have gone undetected, a watchdog has warned. 

Thousands of images and videos of abuse could not be removed from the web as analysts were too busy looking into incorrect tip-offs, charity Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said.

One individual alone made 8,300 statements since June this year despite having been repeatedly informed that what they were reporting was “off remit”.

Of the 106,830 reports made in 2018, 29,670 were legitimate. 

A senior analyst at IWF, whose name has been removed due to the need for anonymity in his job, said: "Last year it took over four years’ worth of analyst's time to deal with false reports. Imagine what we could have achieved for victims of sexual abuse.

“There could have been thousands of criminal sites that we could be getting offline – thousands of illegal images of children being sexually abused we could be removing from the internet.

"We are instead dealing with reports of something that we know we can’t do anything about.”

Some of the reports wrongly sent to the IWF include non-criminal adult material from pornographic websites or non-criminal images of children, such as “child modelling” or even holiday photos.

Analysts were also sent other forms of content including videos of beheadings or animal cruelty.

"We don’t expect people to be able to make their own assessments of criminal content on the internet – that’s what we’re here for," the analyst added.

“But by reporting anything and everything to us, when we’re here to deal with one really serious online criminality, takes up time and resources and diverts our efforts away from the victims.

“We treat every report as though that person has legitimately stumbled upon child sexual abuse material until we’ve been able to verify otherwise.”

A new reporting page has been launched today outlining cases that the IWF can look into.

IWF CEO Susie Hargreaves OBE said: "We know that some people might out of desperation just want to report it somewhere, but we need to look after our analysts.

“We can prepare them for seeing images of children being sexually abused, but it’s harder to prepare for the unknown and unexpected, such as beheadings, or animal cruelty. It can have a real impact on our analysts.”

The IWF website provides a list of different organisations, websites and resources to help the public find the right person to speak to for material which falls outside this remit.

Images and videos of online child sexual abuse can be reported anonymously on the IWF’s new reporting page. 

Reporting child sexual abuse:

- All reports are anonymous, make sure to provide the exact website link.

- Only report instances of child sexual abuse

- If you are concerned about a child's welfare report it to the police​

- The images the IWF can take action on must be pornographic, be grossly offensive, and focus on a child's genitals or depict sexual activity involving or in the presence of a child. Anything of this nature, which is also hosted in the UK, the IWF can get removed.