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.

More Positive Stories on the War on Child Sex Abuse - Episode IX

Watchdog Employee Opens Up About Having To Find Child Sex Abuse Images Every Day

Dominic Smithers 

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) works tirelessly to remove indecent images of children from the web, deleting thousands every year.

The task is carried out by a team of 13 analysts, with each member trawling the internet and taking down some of the most horrific films and photographs of children being abused and raped across the world.

To prepare them for the role they are shown indecent images during their interview, and once they take the job have to attend mandatory counselling sessions every month.

Speaking to LADbible, one of the foundation's analysts - who wished to remain anonymous - said he's managed to build up resilience, but is still angered by what he sees.

He said: "You come across really bad images, stuff you just wouldn't believe. Some of the different pictures and videos have a level of violence and torture and they are the ones that stay with me the most.

"I remember one particularly awful video and it wasn't just sexual abuse, there was a level of violence and torture in the video and the youngest child was 18 months old, very young.

"That was really hard to see for the first time. And every now and again you just need to go out and take a breather to re-centre yourself.

"I think if you ask any analyst they will say the same, they will all have one or two images or videos that stay with them and affect them a bit more than the others."

He added: "You can definitely get angry. Particularly images or videos in which the children may be getting violently tortured as well as sexually abused. Seeing babies being abused would make most people angry.

"But everyone who works here is very supportive of each other, which help us deal with what we see."

Last year the IWF removed more than 100,000 websites showing the abuse of children. Credit: IWF

Every day, the team have to search through a list of 2,000 sites known to promote the abuse of children, and then get to work to delete any illegal content they come across and have the URLs taken down.

This is on top of the hundreds of reports they receive from the public.

But with thousands of images on any site, the analyst said you can quickly find yourself falling down a 'rabbit hole', with no end in sight. He said: "You could spend a day taking images down from one site and then you come in the next day, go on a different website and the same images pop up again."

But despite the frustration of often having to remove the same image multiple times, he says he is 'immensely proud' of the organisation's work. "Anything we can do to stop people stumbling across these images and stopping victims being re-victimised makes me proud.

"We sometimes have young people contact the hotline asking for sexual images of themselves to be removed that have been uploaded without their consent and being able to help people like that makes me really proud."

Analysts can have to look at hundreds of images of child abut a day. Credit: IWF

One of the main concerns for the IWF, which was founded in 1996, is that this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

With many illegal operations hiding behind adult porn sites, people are at risk of stumbling across the content by accident.

Not if they avoid adult porn sites!

A recent study from the body found that young men (18-24) might not even recognise an illegal image of a child if they saw one - potentially leaving thousands more images in circulation.

According to the survey, 30 per cent of young men don't think it's illegal to download, view or share indecent images of children when they appear without nudity, while 27 per cent couldn't recognise it if they appear to agree to take part in the picture.

The worrying stats have now led to a campaign, urging young men who may accidentally come across child abuse online, to report it.

A spokesperson for the IWF said: "If you are say a young man curiously googling for perfectly legal sex/pornography sites, or someone just on a perfectly legal pornography site, you might fairly easily stumble across something you realise is - or are suspicious is - an image of a baby or a child being abused. And, like the Sock campaign says, that's when it needs reporting."

My heart goes out to these people. What a hard, horrible job, but someone has to do it as long as there are sick people willing to pay for child porn. And there are a lot of those. God bless you people for what you do.

Marked passports for child sex offenders from

Trinidad & Tobago

LOOP NEWS  

Persons convicted of sexual offences against children will have their passports identified with this information, according to the proposed Sexual Offences Act (Amendment) Bill 2019.

Speaking during his presentation, Al-Rawi said once the once person is a registered sex offender, the information will be relayed to the Commissioner of Police and, if a passport is issued, to the Chief Immigration Officer.

"If you are a registered child offender, you have forfeited the privilege of your anonymity...we will put an endorsement via the Chief Immigration Officer onto your passport to say that you are a child (sex) offender," he said. 

Al-Rawi said the proposed National Sex Offenders Registry would involve a public version and a more detailed private version for police use only.

“We are now saying that there’s a National Sex Offenders’ Register…there is a public aspect which is done on the website, controlled by the Commissioner of Police. There’s limited information – photograph, name, address, etc.”

“But then we have a private register which only the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has and that private register treats with the provisions of the second schedule…name, main address, sex, date of birth, national ID, passport, driver’s permit, telephone number, everything down to fingerprints, DNA, photograph, IP information for devices, email addresses etc,” he said.

He said the database must be constantly updated otherwise an additional offence would result.

Al-Rawi added that deportees and returning nationals, as well as persons under the Transfer of Prisoners Act with previous sexual offence convictions, would be included under this Bill.

He added that there would be an opportunity for persons to request that their record be expunged after a period of time.

Al-Rawi said the Bill will be designed predominantly to protect children, in line with the Children’s Act.

He pointed out several crimes committed against children, as recorded by the Children’s Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, for the period 2015-2018.

Over the period 2015-2018, there were 787 cases involving children aged one to three years, 5.4 percent of the total number of cases.

“787 children in the age group one to three years old reported to the Children’s Authority for sexual abuse.”

There were 1,604 sexual abuse cases reported involving children between the ages of four and six, and 1,837 cases of sexual abuse against children aged seven to nine.

“Children (aged) 10-13, 3,543 (cases), and I’ll stop there. As I begin to paint the picture of what Trinidad and Tobago is. This is what Trinidad and Tobago is…and if you hear anger in my tone I think you’ll know why,” he said.

Al-Rawi also argued that government must stand united on this Bill, even though it conflicts with several articles of the Constitution.

DCI-Liberia Launches Reporting System

for Online Child Abuse

By Joaquin M. Sendolo 

Defence for Children International Liberia (DCI-L), a legally-oriented non-governmental organization involved with juvenile cases and protecting children against trafficking and abuses, has launched an internet portal for reporting sexual images that play on the psyche of children.

The launch, which was held at a resort in Monrovia on Tuesday, February 5, 2019, is the first reporting system on children issues in West Africa.  It has been working in Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Angola, Mauritius, Namibia, Mozambique and Zambia.

According to Attorney Foday M. Kawah, the entity’s executive director, sexual images uploaded on the internet when accessed by children constitute abuse, and reporting such cases through the portal will enable the UK-based Internet Watch Forum (IWF) working with other African countries in preventing such abuses to access the information and delete them from whatever page that uploaded those images.

Besides physical violence perpetrated against children by many guardians and parents, according to Atty. Kawah, children are also sexually abused by allowing them to view nude photos that create psychosocial problems for their well-being.

The launch of the portal coincides with observance of Safer Internet Day, which Kawah said “marks a crackdown on online child sexual abuse images and videos which, supported by IWF, will work with Liberian citizens to drive child sexual abuse imagery off the web.”

“DCI-Liberia’s mandate promotes and protects the rights of children and serve as a watchdog on the government in order to ensure that it fulfills its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Liberian Children Law, including all international protocols under the convention that is in the best interest of children,” Kawah said.

Colorado bill expanding statute of limitations for negligent reporters of child sex abuse gets 1st OK

By Quincy Snowdon, Sentinel

AURORA | Members of a state senate committee Wednesday unanimously approved a proposal from a pair of Aurora Democrats that would more than triple the statute of limitations for people in positions of authority who fail to report alleged sexual assault against children.

If the measure had been law now, it would have forced a different income (outcome?) in a local sex assault case in Cherry Creek schools that garnered headlines for the past year.

A local grand jury indicted three Cherry Creek administrators over a year ago for failing to report claims a 14-year-old girl was sexually abused by an Aurora middle school teacher in 2013.

Hmmm. It's arguable that 5 years would still be too short a period for those responsible for not reporting to be held accountable in this case.

Last month, however, an Arapahoe County judge dismissed the charges against two of the Cherry Creek administrators, citing the statute of limitations had expired before the grand jury’s decision. Prosectors dropped the charges against the third official involved in the case for an unknown reason last spring.

A trio of Democrats and a two  Republicans in the state senate judiciary committee voted 5-0 yesterday to move ahead with Senate Bill 19-049, which would increase the statute of limitations for the crime of failing to report child abuse following an allegation of sexual behavior on a child.

The current statute of limitations expires 18 months after the crime occurred. The proposed measure would bump the statute of limitations to five years.

“Senate Bill 49 is about protecting our kids,” said state Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, who is sponsoring the legislation. “ … Most of the time children don’t report.”

In her testimony before the committee Wednesday, Fields said research shows that 25 percent of girls and about 17 percent of boys will be sexually abused by age 18, but some 80 percent of those assaults will go unreported.

Lawmakers heard more than two hours of testimony from local district attorneys, victim advocates and victims of childhood sexual abuse on Wednesday afternoon.

Several people who testified in favor of the proposed measure alluded to the recent sexual abuse case in the Cherry Creek School District that thrust the state’s mandatory reporting laws into the limelight.

Prairie Middle School teacher Brian Vasquez was convicted on multiple sexual assault charges. Mug shot courtesy Aurora police.

The former Prairie Middle School  officials were accused of conducting their own investigation into the alleged abuse, and at one point made the victim apologize to and hug the convicted perpetrator, former Prairie Middle School teacher Brian Vasquez.

Vasquez was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for the crimes in September. The Cherry Creek School District last year doled out a historic $11.5 settlement to five of Vasquez’s victims.

The District Attorney who prosecuted the Vasquez case, 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler, spoke in favor of Fields’ proposed bill at the hearing at the Capitol Wednesday.

A pair of attorneys, one from the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar and another from a private law firm, were the only people who spoke against the measure.

“The bill would set a dangerous precedent here,” Tristan Gorman with the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar said. “This could be a slippery slope to the expansion of statutes of limitations for other carve-out offenses on a one-off basis.”

Both Brauchler and Denver District Attorney Beth McCann rejected Gorman’s argument in their testimony. McCann called the Prairie Middle School case a “particularly egregious example” of failure to report abuse.

Amanda Gall, a sexual assault resource prosecutor with the Colorado District Attorney’s Council, said the charge of failing to report child sexual abuse has been filed 111 times since the original statute was signed into law in the early 1990s.

Both Fields and Gall said the vast majority of mandatory reporters carry out their duties.

Stephanie Villafuerte, the state’s child protection ombudsman, said the state’s Department of Human Services hotline receives more than 200,000 calls of child abuse or child sexual abuse each year.

Per state law, more than 30 professionals are required to report alleged child abuse, including doctors, dentists, podiatrists, clergy members, among others.

A similar measure died in committee last year following opposition from teacher associations and the Catholic Church. No members of the Catholic Church spoke against the bill at the committee hearing Wednesday.

Current laws stipulate people convicted of failing to report child abuse can be charged with a class three misdemeanor, which can result in a fine of up to $750 and a sentence of up to six months in jail.

 The measure would also slightly increase the workload for local district attorneys and county jails.

Currently, the state reimburses county jails that house state inmates $54.93 per day, according to the bill’s fiscal note. The average cost to house an offender in county jail is $98.83, but can be as expensive as $350.21 per day, depending on the county.

The bill, which is co-sponsored by House Democrat Dafna Michaelson Jenet, D-Aurora, will now goes to the Senate floor for debate.

Bangladesh blocks over 15,000 porn, gambling websites

By Sommer Brokaw

The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission blocked more than 15,000 porn websites and more than 2,000 gambling websites Monday. File Photo by Christopher Schirner/Flickr

(UPI) -- Bangladesh's government shut down more than 15,000 pornography and gambling websites and two popular smartphone video-sharing apps as regulatory pressure mounts in the country.

The Bangladesh government's telecommunications regulator blocked 15,636 porn websites and 2,235 gambling websites Monday, along with the two popular smartphone apps, Tik Tok and Bigo, Bangladeshi news website New Age reported.

Information Technology Minister Mustafa Jabbar confirmed the move on his verified Facebook account.

Two users of the smartphone-based game, Tik Tok, poked fun at recent elections in the nation. With fears that apps could also be misused to make obscene videos, both have been blocked.

"We have found nothing positive out of these two apps and decided to close them accordingly," Jabbar told New Age. "Our effort is to make Internet space free from any sort of indecent content so that the young people can take benefit out of it."

What kind of idea is that? It will never catch on in the west. But God bless you for doing it!

Rachael Denhollader to publish a memoir and children's book in September

Matt Mencarini, Lansing State Journal 

Rachael Denhollader, the first woman to publicly say that Larry Nassar sexually abused her, will publish a memoir and children's book later this year. 

The book cover for Rachael Denhollander's memoir titled "What Is a Girl Worth?" which will be released in September. (Photo: Courtesy photo)

The titles — "What Is a Girl Worth?" and "How Much Is a Little Girl Worth?" — reference the question she asked in her victim-impact statements during Nassar's sentencing in Ingham and Eaton counties. 

The books will be published in September 2019 by Tyndale House Publishers and their release will be followed by a national media tour, according to a news release. 

In the memoir, Denhollander will reveal the crushing impact that this abuse has had on her life; trace her journey in harnessing the courage to speak out against such abuse— both for herself and on behalf of abuse victims everywhere; and illuminate the path to a better way forward. 

The children's book, "How Much Is a Little Girl Worth?", will be Denhollander's "anthem to little girls everywhere," according to the news release, to teach them that they have immeasurable value and help them develop confidence.

The book cover for Rachael Denhollander's memoir titled "How Much Is a Little Girl Worth?" which will be released in September.

(Photo: Courtesy photo)

The hardcover of the memoir will cost $26.99 and the the hardcover of the children's book will cost $14.99, according to the news release. 

Denhollander's story sparked the Larry Nassar scandal

In 2016, Denhollander reached out to the Indianapolis Star after the newspaper published an investigation of USA Gymnastics' handling of sexual assault complaints. 

For more than a year, Denhollander was the public face and voice of those Nassar abused. Many of the more than 200 women and girls who give victim-impact statements during Nassar's sentencings thanked her by name for giving them the courage and confidence to come forward. 

Denhollander testified against Nassar during one of his Ingham County preliminary hearings. She's also one of the nine women and girls Nassar, a former Michigan State University and USAG doctor, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting. 

Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison on three child pornography convictions and decades more in prison on state sexual assault convictions. 

The fallout from the Nassar scandal has led to criminal investigations of MSU, Congressional hearings focused on sexual abuse in youth sports and resignations at MSU and USAG.

Children's Own 'Sex Selfies' Fuelling Rise in Child Sex Abuse Images

Experts said 11-15 year-olds were copying celebrity idols who were frequently sharing naked selfies

Olivia Rudgard, social affairs correspondent 

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. 

India Orders ISPs to Block Child Sex Abuse Content By July 31

All India | Press Trust of India 

Panel noted that most CSAM is hosted outside India and web links for such content frequently change

The government has directed Internet Service Providers (ISP) to block distribution and transmission of child sexual abuse content by July 31.

"ISP's having cable landing station gateways/ international long distance licences in India shall be required to adopt and implement IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) resources on or before July 31, 2017, to prevent distribution and transmission of online CSAM in to India," the Ministry of Electronics and IT said in an order dated April 18, 2017.

The directive has been issued after the recommendation of an inter-ministerial committee that was constituted to recommend solutions to address the issue of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) following a Supreme Court order.

The panel noted that most of the CSAM is being hosted outside India and the websites or web links to access such unlawful content are dynamic in nature and frequently changing which makes it difficult to block such content.

The panel noted that no centralised mechanism exists in India to monitor online CSAM.

However, it noted that an entity, Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), maintains such a list of dynamically updated websites and web pages containing online CSAM.

The IWF has been adopted by many countries and is already being implemented by leading online service providers in other jurisdictions but not in India.

The IWF resources are also available to ISPs on a subscription basis either individually or collectively.

The ministry has asked all the ISPs to continue to observe the existing due diligence requirements prescribed by the central government under the Information Technology Act 2000 and rules and regulations.

The publication or transmission of material depicting children in sexually explicit act or conduct in electronic form is heinous crime, specifically prohibited by section 67B of the IT Act 2000.

The Supreme Court in an order dated July 12, 2013, had directed the government to tackle the CSAM issue.

British Overseas Territories Host more than 1,000 Child Sex Abuse Websites

British overseas territories host more than 1,000 child sex abuse websites despite a Government crack down on exploitation

By Harvey Day For Mailonline

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found 13 child abuse websites with 1,488 web pages on the .io domain for the British Indian Ocean Territory in 2016.

This revelation is embarrassing for the UK government which has spent £50 million advising other countries on how to tackle child abuse. 

British overseas territories are hosting more than 1,000 child sex abuse websites.

Pictured, Diego Garcia beach in the British Indian Ocean Territory

The IWF also found its first case of sexual abuse images on the .sh domain for St Helena, according to The Sunday Times. 

The British Indian Ocean Territory is a collection of islands in the Indian Ocean overseen by the UK.

The largest island is Diego Garcia, the site of a joint military base used by the United Kingdom and the United States.

Web addresses, or domains, for these British territories are sold by the Internet Computer Bureau (ICB).

The ICB, owned by Paul and Fiona Kane, say they make no profit from the .io domain and that anyone registering a website has agreed not to use it for illegal purposes.

There is no suggestion the Kanes or the ICB have done anything wrong.

An ICB spokesman told MailOnline: 'ICB treats complaints and potential breaches with the utmost seriousness, and enforces its robust policies for removing offending content and domain names, regularly taking enforcement actions when complaints are made with Law Enforcement Agencies.' 

Last year the .io domain accounted for almost 3 per cent of all child abuse web pages detected by IWF, the Sunday Times reported. 

Almost all of the criminal imagery accessed through the .io domain was held in the Netherlands. 

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office told MailOnline: 'The British Government has a zero tolerance approach to child abuse and child pornography and is committed to stamping out these horrific crimes.

'We are urgently looking into this and will take action as needed with the relevant authorities.'

According to the IWF: 'Criminals are increasingly using masking techniques to hide child sexual abuse images and videos on the internet and leaving clues to paedophiles so they can find it – hidden behind legal content.'

Susie Hargreaves OBE, IWF CEO, added: 'Whilst it's positive that the UK continues to remain hostile to child sexual abuse material, the global picture isn't good.' 

The British Indian Ocean Territory is a collection of islands in the Indian Ocean overseen by the UK. Pictured, Diego Garcia military base

'We've opened reporting portals across the globe with more planned.' 

'In other countries, internet companies are exploited and, worst of all, children who have been sexually abused are further exploited.'

'Internet companies and large businesses who are doing nothing, or too little, to address online child sexual abuse imagery need to step up and work with us.'

In June 2016, dedicated web portals to allow people to report images and videos of child sexual abuse were launched in 12 British overseas territories.

A team of IWF analyst were working directly with the internet industry and law enforcement to have abusive imagery removed.

British overseas territories include:

Anguilla.

Bermuda.

British Antarctic Territory.

British Indian Ocean Territory.

British Virgin Islands.

Cayman Islands.

Falkland Islands.

Gibraltar.

Diego Garcia, BIOT

British Campaigners Warn of Emergency Over Online Child Sexual Abuse

NSPCC report suggest more than half a million men in the UK may have viewed child sexual abuse images online

 An Internet Watch Foundation analyst enters a room where reported sites are viewed. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Esther Addley, Guardian

Child exploitation campaigners have warned of a looming “social emergency” after a report by the NSPCC suggested more than half a million men in the UK may have viewed child sexual abuse images on the internet.

The new figures, based on a large-scale German study this year, are far higher than previous estimates. In 2013 it was suggested that around 50,000 UK-based individuals were involved in downloading and sharing abusive images of children. Last month police chiefs said they feared the number may have risen significantly since then, with one report putting it at up to 100,000.

The German study, which surveyed more than 8,700 men, found that 2.4% of respondents admitted looking at online images of child sexual abuse. Applying the figures to the male UK population, the NSPCC said, “would equate to an estimate that there may be between 450,000 and 590,000 males aged 18-89 in the UK who have at some point viewed and used child sexual abuse images.”

Peter Wanless, the NSPCC’s chief executive, said: “The sheer numbers of people viewing child sexual abuse images online must be addressed as a social emergency. It is two years since the government made it a national priority to rid the internet of these vile crimes against children, but today’s report reveals how horrifyingly prolific the problem remains.”

In the past five years, the charity notes, the number of police-recorded offences under obscene publications laws has more than doubled in all four of the UK nations, with a total of 8,745 crimes recorded last year.

“However, this data only tells us how many images have been found or offenders who have been caught – the true scale of the issue remains unknown,” the charity said.

Wanless said the NSPCC was calling for “a robust action plan to cut off the supply of child sexual abuse images in circulation and deter adults from seeking out child abuse online.”

We cannot ‘arrest our way out’ of this challenge

He said the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which represents the internet industry, had removed tens of thousands of abusive websites, and he acknowledged the work of the National Crime Agency (NCA) in protecting a record number of victims. “But it is clear, from the scale of the problem, that we cannot ‘arrest our way out’ of this challenge,” he said.

The charity wants internet firms operating in the UK to sign up to a set of minimum standards, enforced by new regulatory powers, and is calling for an independent annual audit of the current system of voluntary self-regulation, to ensure it is as effective as possible in tackling the problem. 

In addition, it is calling on the government to produce an annual report on the identification and removal of child abuse images accessed from within the UK.

Alan Wardle, head of policy for the NSPCC, said part of the challenge for agencies was the difficulty in establishing the scale of a crime that is both hidden and international in reach. “One of the trends we are seeing is that abuse can be ‘done to order’ and livestreamed from poorer parts of the world, and I think that is only going to get worse as the internet becomes a more globalised force. 

“[The question has] got to be: how do we prevent this happening, how do we stop people getting these images online and sharing them? Particularly with the technology companies, there’s a big responsibility to ensure that this material is as difficult to find, to share, to access on the internet as it possibly can be.”

The Home Office welcomed the report, calling the viewing of child abuse images an “appalling crime” and saying it was committed to working with other agencies “to stamp out online child sexual exploitation”.

“The NCA has received additional funding of £10m for further specialist teams, enabling a near-doubling of their investigative capability, meaning more children being safeguarded,” a spokesman said, adding that the government had led international action on online child exploitation and worked with other countries, the internet industry and NGOs to develop a coordinated response.

A spokesperson for the IWF said the UK was already “the most hostile place in the world for hosting child sex abuse content. Our success in the UK is due to our unparalleled relationships with the internet industry. The internet is without geographical borders, so a truly global effort is what’s needed.”

That's a scary indictment of the rest of the western world where very few, if any, steps have been taken by governments to work with the industry to purge the internet of this great evil. Most western governments have their heads buried in the sand and seem to be happy that this, and child sex abuse in general, have not become political hot buttons. What a disgrace! Are politicians so utterly callous, or are they that stupid that they just don't know the scale of CSA in the world?

People we have to make child sex abuse a political hot potato. It has not even been mentioned once in the year and a half of presidential electioneering in the US even though it is easily the worst atrocity happening in society today.

Child Sex Abuse Org Urges Web Firms to Sign up to “Game-Changing” Hash List

Extraordinary success by IWF

needs to be repeated around the world

Online outfits can stamp out copies, stop sharing, prevent image uploads, says IWF chief

KELLY FIVEASH (UK)

    Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

On its twentieth anniversary, the UK's Internet Watch Foundation—propped up by Microsoft's PhotoDNA tech—is urging Web companies to use its list of digital fingerprints to help prevent the upload, sharing, and storage of child abuse sex images online.

The IWF hash list of the underlying code associated with child abuse images was distributed to Google, Facebook, and Twitter in August 2015. It is compiled by analysts at the charity, who have the gruelling task of sifting through photos and videos showing children being sexually abused. Every eight minutes they identify a new webpage containing horrendous images.

To date, 125,583 hashes have be added to the list—more than 3,000 of which involved the abuse of babies and toddlers.

IWF chief Susie Hargreaves said that the org's analysts had always removed reported images. "But in the past it could be uploaded again, and again," she said.

"This was incredibly frustrating for us and dreadfully sad for those victims. Now our new technology allows us, and any company which uses the Image Hash List, to hunt out those abusive images, meaning Internet companies can completely stamp out copies, stop the sharing, and even stop the image being uploaded in the first place.

"This is a major breakthrough. Each and every one of these images is the painful record of a child being sexually abused. Their suffering is very real. These victims have the right to know someone is fighting this important battle."

The IWF revealed the latest figures to mark 20 years since it began fighting the circulation of child sexual abuse images online. Since 1996, it has taken down a quarter of a million URLs.

Ars asked the charity to explain how Microsoft's offering would be protected against the danger posed by making its hash list available in the cloud. IWF's technical projects officer Harriet Lester told us that Microsoft was hosting the "cloud solution" on its servers, and said that it takes "great care to ensure security and use threat mitigation practices. These are vital to the protection of services and data."

She added: "The hashes which are hosted on the cloud do not leave the cloud. When a company wants to compare an image on their services, they use an API to send the image up to the cloud and receive a yes/no reply if the image has matched to the IWF hashes.

"The hashes will be in Microsoft PhotoDNA format, we do not host any child sexual abuse images on the cloud, a PhotoDNA hash is irreversible."

As of today, the charity says that 0.2 percent of child sexual abuse images are hosted in the UK, compared with 18 percent in 1996.

  video 8:11

In 2015, the IWF removed nearly 70,000 child sex abuse images from the Web. In the same year, more than 2,800 individuals in Britain were prosecuted for indecent images of children offences—a 27 percent increase on 2014.

This is extraordinary! Thank you and God bless each of you at IWF. Use of the hash-list should be mandatory in every country and on every server in the world. 

Scale of Child Abuse Laid Bare: Hundreds of Web Pages Found Everyday With Sick Images

RECORD numbers of child sexual abuse images are being found online, a sickening report has found.

By REBECCA FLOOD

The report found more than 900 sick images a day online


The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is finding 200 web pages with child sex abuse images on every day, many being hidden in the dark web.

There are also soaring numbers of reports of criminal images popping up on the web, with 68,092 URLs rooted out and removed from the internet last year alone, a rise of 118 per cent since 2014. 

In one single day, in October, a record breaking 941 web pages were found to have the banned images on them.

In total, a third of all the images contained scenes of rape and sexual torture of children, and nearly a quarter of the images were class as “commercial”.

Writing in the report, Prime Minister David Cameron said: "This has been a hugely important year for those at the front of our global efforts against the crime of the taking and sharing of images depicting the sexual abuse of children."

The IWF said that the unprecedented rise came after a shift in 2014 which allowed its analytics to proactively search for abuse images, alongside receiving reports from members of the public


Nearly 70,000 URLs were shut down last year

Compared with 2013, the number of pages confirmed as containing illegal images or videos jumped 417 per cent.

We've seen a dramatic increase in the sheer number

of illegal images and videos that we've been

able to remove from the internet

Susie Hargreaves

Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the IWF, said: "Last year our analysts broke all records for assessing reports.

"By being allowed to actively search for these hideous images of children, we've seen a dramatic increase in the sheer number of illegal images and videos that we've been able to remove from the internet."

Out of the global pages just 0.2 per cent were UK hosts, with action taken on 135 web pages.


David Cameron said it was an important year in tackling images of sexual abuse of children. Getty

And for the first time last year, experts discovered “hidden services” in the dark web which regularly changed web addresses.

A report into the practice said: "Child sexual abuse websites on the open web regularly do this to try to stop being found.

"But this was the first time we'd seen it routinely done by hidden services."

New technology is also underway to create a database logging duplicate images by giving each a unique code.

Ms Hargreaves added: "Most images have been shared online for years and there are often thousands of duplicates of individual images on the internet.


One day saw 941 web pages found with sick images Getty

"Until recently, this meant that most victims had to live with the knowledge that those images will be shared again and again."

More Than 31,000 Web Pages of Child Porn as Paedophiles Adapt

More than 31,000 web pages containing child sex abuse images have been found by a UK watchdog warning that paedophiles are using bitcoin in efforts to cover their tracks.

Popular image hosting websites used by the public to share holiday snaps and other pictures are being abused by criminals distributing the material, researchers found.

Many victims appeared to be younger than 10 and some photos and videos involved rape, bestiality and sadism, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said in its annual report.

Revenge porn offenders will face up to two years in prison
Watchdog works to get thousands of links removed a year & websites taken down

Chief executive Susie Hargreaves that while the online industry was “stepping up” efforts to block and remove images, many companies did not recognise there was a problem, or were too slow to respond.

“It is not good enough for those companies to allow the burden of responsibility to fall on a socially responsible few,” she added.

“This year will ensure they have nowhere to hide as we will be targeting them for the benefit of all internet users and victims of sexual abuse.” Google said it would seek to block child sex abuse images after suggestions that it was failing in its ‘moral duty’.

Google is among the companies trying to block child sex abuse images

Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and large internet providers are among the 117 companies and groups funding the IWF and helping its efforts to remove the images.

The 31,266 URLs found hosting pictures and videos of children being sexually abused in 2014 as a 137 per cent increase on the total in 2013, although the IWF put that rise down to improved search methods.

It comes after the regulator was given new powers to seek out criminal content in the wake of the murders of 12-year-old Tia Sharp and April Jones, five, by men found to have viewed child abuse images.

The IWF said that just 0.3% of imagery found in 2014 was hosted in the UK, compared with 18 per cent back in 1996.

 April Jones was abducted and killed by Mark Bridger,
who had child sex abuse images on his computer, in October 2012

Most of the images identified were hosted in North America and Europe, and in 45 countries in total.

Of the 95 UK-based web pages removed last year, almost 90 per cent contained images of children appearing to be aged 10 or under.

Emma Hardy, the IWF's director of external relations, said the group had 74,000 reports from the public last year and was now able to proactively search for child abuse images but the figure was the tip of the iceberg.

“I think there's still a huge amount out there,” she added. “We've got a long way to go until we see the peak of this problem.”

The IWF found many legitimate websites, mainly image hosting services, were being abused by criminals distributing child sexual abuse imagery. The Conservatives would forced internet regulators to block porn sites without age checks.

80% of images found featured girls and almost half included adults

The number of URLs removed from hosting sites, which allow people to create a shareable link directly to an image, rose from 5,594 in 2013 to 19,710 in 2014.

Meanwhile, online file hosting services saw 5,582 URLs removed because they were hosting child sex abuse images in 2014, compared with 1,400 in 2013.

Around 12 per cent of the pages found to contain the material were classed as “commercial” and the most prolific of those sites are now accepting bitcoin.

The virtual currency enables people to pay from their computer or phone in encrypted transactions independent of any bank that could be used to trace paedophiles.

The IWF said it was working with the world’s largest bitcoin exchanges to share intelligence and prevent the use of the currency on child sex abuse sites.

Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency that has gained popularity worldwide

It alerts law enforcement agencies and hotlines abroad when it discovers foreign-based sites with child sexual abuse images and “repeatedly chases” them until they are removed.

Writing in the IWF report, Home Secretary Theresa May said: “The IWF plays a vital role in combating child sexual abuse and protecting children from these despicable crimes.

"Its introduction of proactive searching across the internet has vastly increased the number of abuse images being removed from circulation."