Published: Wed 23 Apr 2025
Call for Member States to come together and push forward with ‘desperately needed’ child protection laws as thousands of webpages containing children’s sexual abuse traced back to EU servers.
New IWF data shows that the EU hosts more than half of the global webpages found by IWF to contain confirmed child sexual abuse material, at a time when ‘desperately needed’ child protection legislation continues to be blocked in the Council of the European Union.
A report released today by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reveals that the EU remains a prime destination for criminals determined to share, sell and buy sexual images and videos of children.
The IWF is Europe’s largest hotline for the detection, assessment and removal of child sexual abuse imagery online and it is one of only a handful of hotlines in the world with the legal powers to proactively search for this content.
The IWF says that data like this should ‘act as clarion call’ for Member States to urgently move forward with the much-delayed EU child sexual abuse regulation which lays down rules for preventing and combating child sexual abuse.
In 2024, according to the IWF report, more than half (62%) of the child sexual abuse webpages that were ‘actioned’ by the IWF contained content that was traced to hosting services in EU countries. This is an 11-percentage point increase from 140,911 webpages in 2023, to 181,112 last year.
When the IWF identifies child sexual abuse online, trained analysts perform a trace on the URL to identify the location of the physical server that is hosting the content and get it removed from the internet as quickly as possible. This also tells them which partners they need to work with, whether law enforcement or another hotline, and in which country.
When the content is removed from the physical server – its source – it means that the imagery should be removed from any sites, such as blogs, forums or image hosts, that could be linking to it.
The Netherlands hosts most of the global criminal content found online by IWF*, with the percentage down from 33% in 2023, to 29% in 2024 (91,572 URLs to 83,037 URLs respectively). Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and Poland, the next four countries in the EU list, have all seen an increase in the amount of content they host.
Poland, which currently holds the EU Council presidency, is positioned as the fifth worst in the EU at 4% of the EU total and eighth in the world for hosting child sexual abuse material (3% of global total). The volume of content is nearly 86 times bigger than last year (94 URLs in 2023 to 8,077 in 2024), an increase of more than 8,000%.
Expert analysts at the IWF say this is mostly down to one problem website with high volumes of criminal material moving to servers in Poland. The IWF has worked closely with counterparts in the Polish hotline to ensure the content is taken down.
Some criminal child sexual abuse sites, especially those created specifically to share imagery for commercial gain, are dynamic and deliberately move their hosting from country to country to avoid removal. The IWF continues to track and count these sites when they change location and seeks to take them offline wherever they go. The problem website in Poland had previously been found and actioned by the IWF in more than 10 other countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Romania.
The 2024 Annual Insights and Data Report also reveals that the IWF discovered child sexual abuse, or links to it, a record-breaking 291,273 times last year. Of those reports where the sex of children is recorded, 97% (or 278,492) showed the sexual abuse of girls only – an increase of 14,246 since 2023.
Almost a third of the images and videos ‘hashed’ by the IWF (given a unique digital code), (210,572 or 29%) included Category A child sexual abuse – the most extreme imagery which can depict rape, sadism, or even bestiality.
In addition, 245 reports processed in 2024 contained actionable AI-generated images of child sexual abuse. This is a 380% increase on 2023 where just 51 contained actionable AI-generated images of child sexual abuse.
Derek Ray-Hill, Interim CEO of the IWF said: “The time for delay is over. Children around the world need our help more than ever to protect them online.
“These figures indicate the desperate need for the EU’s pivotal legislation to tackle the pernicious spread of child sexual abuse online and should act as a clarion call for EU Member States to come together and act on this issue.
“Specifically, we need the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation to be adopted without delay to ensure companies undertake proactive detection. We also call for the passage of the Child Sexual Abuse Directive which would criminalise the production and dissemination of AI-generated child sexual abuse material.
“At the IWF we are determined to see the establishment of a strong legal framework in the EU so that child sexual abuse imagery can be detected and prevented from being shared further.
“The EU cannot become a safe haven for perpetrators to freely abuse children and exchange criminal content.”
Martyna Różycka, Hotline Manager at Poland’s Dyżurnet.pl / NASK hotline, said: “Criminals exploit every opportunity and any weakness in CSAM** content detection and mitigation systems to spread such material.
“It is our responsibility, as a society, to ensure these actions are blocked and we respond to them quickly.
“Currently, the Polish hotline Dyżurnet.pl / NASK is working on an advanced system for faster reports analysis and rapid CSAM content detection using AI-based methods.
“We are fully aware of the threat and the consequences we may face if we do not swiftly regulate the rules for reporting CSAM content by platforms operating within the EU.
“That is why we are very keen to urgently adopt the CSAR proposal, thanks to which we will build the European system for combating CSAM and prosecuting perpetrators of this type of crimes, which often have an international dimension.
“We remain in constant contact with our Ministry of Digital Affairs and ensure that our voice is heard.”
Sabine Saliba, Secretary General of child protection network Eurochild, said: “These figures are an urgent wake-up call to the EU to protect children online.
“Member States must stop turning a blind eye to this crisis and urgently mandate the detection, reporting and removal of child sexual abuse online.”
IWF announces ‘ground-breaking’ decision to give thousands of smaller platforms free protection from millions of child sexual abuse images and videos as new report reveals scale of online threat to children.
