Case Studies

Where we spot a new trend, or believe that it’s helpful to take a deeper look at something we’ve spotted during the course of our work, we produce a case study. This annual report features three. 

We’ve seen in this past year how the commercial landscape is changing and how viral marketing techniques – pyramid scheme-type sites – are being used to increase the number of people who see child sexual abuse material. This technique has resulted in thousands of public reports being made to us.  

We worked hard this year to prevent a particular case of child sexual abuse imagery going viral online – you can read about how we mobilised around a live incident. And we performed an image-level analysis on our dataset showing very young children aged three to six years old who had been groomed and coerced via an internet connected device with someone on the other side making a recording to share online. It’s not an easy read, but for anyone working to safeguard children, or explain online risks to parents and carers, it’s a must.