I have recently become an IWF Champion. This means that I fully support the work that the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) does to remove child sexual abuse imagery from the internet.
About IWF
They minimise the availability of online child sexual abuse content. Specifically:
- Child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world.
- Non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK.
They work internationally to make the internet a safer place. They help victims of child sexual abuse worldwide by identifying and removing online images and videos of their abuse. They search for child sexual abuse images and videos and offer a place for the public to report them anonymously. They then have them removed. They also provide tools to internet companies to help them make their services safer for internet users.
They are not-for-profit organisation and are supported by the global internet industry and the European Commission.
How they remove content
They offer the public a safe place to report suspected online child sexual abuse images and videos anonymously.
Their team of content analysts are experts. Their assessments are accurate and trusted by the police and internet industry across the globe.
They search for child sexual abuse images and videos using the latest technology. They identify them, report them and have them removed.
Each week, their team of expert analysts assess and remove more than 1,000 webpages, which could be hosted anywhere in the world. Each webpage may contain thousands of images.
How they make the internet safer
They help the internet industry join the fight against online child sexual abuse imagery, by providing a raft of world-class specialist services to their Members.
By developing and working with the latest technologies, they may be able to stop thousands of images of abuse from being uploaded in the first place.
They are an independent not-for-profit organisation, supported by Members from the global internet industry, whose membership fee funds their vital work.
Find out more about IWF Membership.
They offer an international reporting solution
They help countries without anywhere to report images and videos of child sexual abuse. They provide a reporting button which feeds directly to their expert analysts in the UK, who assess the reports and remove content.
Find out more about International Reporting Portal.
They work globally
They work with local, national and international police to help them identify and rescue child sexual abuse victims.
You can find out more about how they do this here.
IWF in action:
They currently assess over 1,000 URLs per week.
As a direct result of their work, child sexual abuse content hosted in the UK has reduced from 18% in 1996 to below 0.1% today.
Content hosted in the UK is removed quickly – usually in less than 2 hours.
They hold the ISO 27001 standard and their Hotline is audited by an independent team, led by a former High Court Judge.
20 years of removing content
IWF have been removing content for over 20 years. See their key milestones from the past 20 years on their interactive timeline.
To find out more about the Internet Watch Foundation visit iwf.org.uk