Published: Mon 30 Mar 2015
The UK Hotline for reporting criminal content online, known as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) welcomes its latest member, Quickline Communications, an Internet Service Provider. It joins their nationwide initiative to provide a trusted and secure service to help protect people from exposure to child sexual abuse images online.
As a member of the IWF, Quickline will monitor URLs to target the illegal sources and raise awareness of the importance of online protection facilities. By working together the IWF, Quickline aim to block traffic for hosts of child sexual abuse websites, from coming into and leaving the UK.
The IWF works in partnership with law enforcement, the Government, international partners and Internet Service Providers, including 120 companies world-wide to support the fight against online abuse images and videos.
Quickline Managing Director, Steve Jagger, says:
“As a business it is vital to protect our customers online, within the communities we serve and beyond. By joining the IWF, it allows us to receive accurate and current URL lists in order to disrupt access to any child sexual abuse content that has not yet been taken down by the authorities.”
The IWF has succeeded in reducing the amount of UK hosted websites with explicit content to less than 1% since 2003 in comparison to 18% in 1996. By sharing information, the IWF has helped identify and rescue 12 children over the last 3 years and by recruiting ISPs around the globe, it is hoped that child sexual abuse material will be stamped out altogether.
IWF CEO, Susie Hargreaves, highlights the importance of tackling online child sexual abuse as a society:
“Tackling this issue has to be everyone’s responsibility. It cannot simply be a matter for the police or the online industry to resolve, although clearly they must take the lead. Our hope is that by raising awareness of this appalling issue, we can encourage people to publicly talk about online content and ensure the absolute maximum is being done to combat the problem.”
Steve Jagger explains:
“Where images are reported they are immediately added to a list and they’re blocked by search engines and ISPs so people can’t access those sites. These search engines also act to block illegal images and the URLs, or pathways, that lead to these images from search results, once they’ve been alerted to their existence.”
“We take online safety very seriously and through our other company, Tech4Schools we provide ICT education within schools. It is of the upmost importance that we are able to protect school pupils from explicit data and secure the ability to block any websites we deem highly inappropriate.”
“Quickline is amongst some of the industry’s top leading companies such as BT, TalkTalk and Tesco that have already chosen to join the IWF in a bid to battle child sexual abuse images online. These companies also support and encourage the use of technology within schools in order to enhance the learning experience within the classroom.”
Local MP Ian Sollom learned about the herculean task faced by analysts at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) who find, assess and remove child sexual abuse material on the internet.
