Torrent of abuse could reduce to trickle thanks to protections fourteen years in the making

How many nude and sexual images of children should we allow to be captured through a child’s own device?

Yet we are seeing children being exploited, manipulated, groomed, deceived and encouraged to share their own and other young people’s nude and sexual imagery via their own devices. Not occasionally, not in isolated incidents, but on an industrial scale.

And criminals have become adept at cornering and coercing children into doing this. They have been doing it for years.

For those of us who work in online child protection, this is a sad but acknowledged truth. For the average parent, however, it’s an unthinkable horror story where the phone in their child’s rucksack is an open door for the internet’s worst criminals.

For too many families, this has been a lived reality. And without action, more and more will experience this heartbreak in the near future.

We need a solution. And that is why we were pleased to see the Government laying out its plans in the form of on-device protections – measures which would block the sending and receiving of nude or sexual imagery on a child’s device.

It makes so much sense.

When Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for Digital, addressed the Commons on September 8, she said the public can be reassured the UK Government is working with haste, and is collaborating with Google and Apple to make this happen.

I’d like to posit what good looks like: We need more than a remedy. We need intervention before the harms can even occur.

The Internet Watch Foundation is the UK organisation responsible for preventing the spread of child sexual abuse imagery online. It is at the forefront of trying to help victims and their families. But despite our work to remove the imagery, the horrendous harms have already been inflicted.

Along with Childline, we run the Report Remove helpline which gives young people in the UK a safe and confidential way to self-report nude or sexual imagery of themselves. We are experiencing a torrent of reports from UK children using Report Remove.

If on-device protections are in place, and are used correctly, this should soon resemble a trickle.

Children are telling us that they’ve been extorted for money or more imagery off the back of an image that reveals too much of their bodies – good on-device protections should make this a thing of the past, making it so a child's device will not take a nude selfie and will not allow a nude selfie to be sent or received or viewed.

If we can stop the imagery getting out into the world, we can intervene early in what could have been a horrifying spiral and shut the door on future threats of harassment, sextortion, bullying, and blackmail – offences we know are so serious their victims are sometimes driven to taking their own lives.

In 2012 the IWF published a world-first snapshot study into a relatively new phenomenon known as ‘sexting’.

Fourteen years ago this month, analysts at the IWF, dedicated just 47 working hours to counting the amount of content they could find which was sexually explicit of young people which appeared to be ‘self-generated’ either by themselves or someone else not physically present.

A whopping 88% of what was discovered had been harvested from its original upload location and placed elsewhere. The warning signs were there.

Subsequent studies in 2015 and 2018 were carried out, each time noting how sexting was evolving into a recognisable method where children were visibly manipulated and exploited by perpetrators to produce child sexual abuse images to feed a terrible online market.

From mid-2018, this variety of child sexual abuse imagery was so commonplace in the work of IWF’s analysts, that we began recording data every time this imagery was identified through a report.

In our 2024 annual report (published in April 2025), 91% of the reports assessed as criminal were found to contain at least one ‘self-generated’ image or video.

This is where content involving a child is captured, created, or shared through a device, whether by a perpetrator, the child themselves or by another individual.

Children are not to blame. Grooming, coercion, manipulation, encouragement, as well as natural age-appropriate curiosity and relationship-forming are present.

Each report we assess may contain one, or many child sexual abuse images and/or videos. In our 2025 data this proportion decreases only slightly to 85% - in numbers this is a horrifying 264,868 reports where this type of imagery was present.

Last year we added 140,276 unique hashes of ‘self-generated’ child sexual abuse images and videos, representing 27% of the hashes added to our database that year – including from offenders’ devices provided to us direct from the police.

On-device protections are a preventative remedy. It's an opportunity which must be seized. If Apple, Google and our politicians get this right, this endemic, insidious threat to our children could be headed off – these outrageous crimes could begin to be curtailed – and we could start bringing these numbers down to where they belong: Zero.