Internet Watch Foundation

We published our Annual Report 2006 on 17 April and are very pleased with the reception it has received and the impact it has had so far.

 

Coverage of the trends and intelligence in the report has been widespread and has largely focussed on the messages we were keen to disseminate. The number of articles, features and broadcast interviews we generated is at 450 and counting, including around 40 interviews for radio and television, many of which were live and others which were used across hundreds of independent radio stations. Coverage ranged from the major national newspapers to regional publications as well as online discussion forums and blogs. International coverage has been particularly impressive and we are pleased to have conveyed our messages around the world. See some of the top stories in April's newsletter.

 

Other initial results are equally encouraging. We have had a number of requests from UK parliamentarians for more information and meetings with the IWF and were asked to brief for a Parliamentary Question in recognition of the Report. See the Parliamentary Question here. There was also a DTI Committee & DCMS Committee joint oral evidence session on the day of the Report’s publication which drew further attention to the Report.

 

Visitors to the IWF website and individual page views were up 1500% (to 8,000 and 33,000 respectively) on the day of publication as compared to a week earlier and reports to the IWF ‘Hotline’ rose by 190%.

 

We are particularly pleased with the attention being focussed on many of our key issues around the world and look forward to responding to increased international interest in our work and the success of our self-regulatory model and facilitation of the blocking initiative which protects UK domestic Broadband users from inadvertently accessing abusive images of children.

 

The key messages in the Report are summarised below but can be read in full in the press release here or in the Report itself, here.

 

Our figures for 2006 showed the severity of online child abuse content is increasing, with a four-fold rise in images depicting the most severe abuse, such as penetrative and sadistic sexual activity. This trend reflects an apparent growing demand for purchasing more severe images with nearly 60 per cent of commercial child abuse websites selling child rape images. Indeed, 29 per cent of all potentially illegal child abuse URLs known to the IWF contain level four and five images.

 

We also revealed that 80 per cent of the children in abusive images are female and 91 per cent appear to be under 12 years old.

 

We particularly drew attention to the challenge of having commercial child abuse websites removed from the web, with some of the most prolific sites avoiding closure by ‘hopping’ servers across different legal jurisdictions. One site, for example, has been reported 224 times to the IWF since 2002. This underlines the need for unified international efforts to combat child abuse content.

 

We reported that we have managed a 34 per cent increase in reports processed by our ‘Hotline’. The reports led to the confirmation of 10,656 URLs, on 3,077 websites, containing potentially illegal child abuse content. 82.5 per cent of all the websites were apparently linked to the US or Russia, up from 67.9 per cent in 2005. The increase in reports processed by our ‘Hotline’ team is due in part to the increased awareness of our organisation but also to the identification of a growing trend in the use of remote image storage facilities.

 

Importantly, the UK has virtually eradicated the hosting of potentially illegal online child abuse content within its virtual borders and less than 1% of online child abuse content known to the IWF has been hosted in the UK since 2003.  

Thank you to all those who supported the publication of the Report.

 

If you have any queries about the information in the Report, would like to receive a copy or any other IWF materials, please email info@iwf.org.uk.