Published: Tue 2 Jun 2020
The IWF has brought all its Hotline staff back to work, with new social distancing measures helping them keep safe while continuing to provide a key service.
Throughout the lockdown period the IWF Hotline has remained operational, taking reports from the public, proactively searching for child sexual abuse material, and ensuring the continuity of our services to Members.
However, in order to keep our analysts socially distanced and to meet lockdown requirements, we had split the Hotline into two teams and therefore some operational activities were scaled back which did not impact on the assessment of public reports, or the provision of services and datasets.
IWF Hotline analysts cannot do their work from home, given the nature of the criminal material which they assess.
As of Monday 1 June, all our Hotline staff are now back at work in the office and socially distanced.
To enable this to happen, we’ve extended the Hotline footprint to include the entire first floor of our building, making the required technical infrastructure and security changes to support this. This means our analysts can safely distance, allowing for at least two metres between each person.
A one-way system around the building has been introduced to ensure that people do not cross paths.
The remainder of the IWF workforce continues to work at home, being supported on an individual basis with the equipment they need.
Now that all IWF analysts have returned to work, all Hotline operational activities have resumed.
New online safety guidelines need to be more ambitious if the “hopes of a safer internet” are to be realised, the IWF warns.