The scale and reach of child sexual abuse and exploitation online is truly horrendous. A generation of children is being badly let down by the proliferation of this appalling crime. That is what makes the continuing work of the Internet Watch Foundation alongside international law enforcement, governments and industry more important than ever.
As a government, we are determined to work alongside industry and civil society, both domestically and internationally, to tackle the vile ways in which modern technology is being exploited to groom and abuse children, then make and distribute images of that abuse, re-victimising those children millions of times over, and for decades to come. This report emphasises the urgency of the challenge.
The numbers are stark and shocking. In 2024, the IWF assessed a report of child sexual abuse every 108 seconds. They recorded a total of 291,273 webpages containing or linked to child sexual abuse content, with 97 per cent of these reports exclusively showing the sexual abuse of girls. The industrial scale of this horror can feel overwhelming, but we must never forget that – behind every image – there is an individual child who has been subjected to the most appalling abuse that could affect them for the rest of their lives, and we owe it to each of them to prevent the images of that abuse being circulated online.
That is why the tireless efforts of the IWF are so crucial, and why I applaud them for initiatives like the new Image Intercept service, which will make almost three million hashes of criminal imagery available to companies to help search their online platforms for illegal content and ensure it is removed. I also welcome the IWF’s leading role in tackling emerging threats, ranging from sextortion to the exploitation of AI software, which has helped to shape the world-leading legislation we are bringing forward to target those threats in our Crime and Policing Bill.
That new legislation will make a difference, as will the provisions of the Online Safety Act that have recently come into force, placing clear legal duties on tech companies to remove child sexual abuse content on their platforms. But the central lesson of this IWF report is that we can never stand still. Just as the monsters who prey on children constantly find new ways to produce and share their images of abuse, so the government and industry must work ever harder to eradicate them, and ensure that nothing ever comes before protecting the safety of our children.
The staff and analysts at the IWF deserve enormous credit and gratitude for the immensely challenging work they undertake every single day. But that work must not go to waste. Together, we have to use every available tool to protect children from the abuse exposed in this report and to ensure that the predators responsible face justice. This government remains steadfastly committed to that task.