Coronavirus: 90% fewer child sex abuse images taken down during pandemic, watchdog warns

Figures follow warnings that children could be more vulnerable to online groomers during lockdown

The number of child sex abuse images being taken down has fallen dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic, an online watchdog has warned.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said there had been an 89 per cent reduction in the amount of material being deleted around the world, leaving it available to paedophiles for longer.

In the month to 15 April, almost 1,500 URLs from a flagged list were removed, compared to 15,000 the previous month.

The IWF said national hotlines were working at reduced capacity or had been closed completely during the outbreak, including those in France, Spain and Croatia.

A report released on Monday warned that where child sex abuse material was still being flagged, the companies receiving takedown notifications were taking longer to respond because of their own staffing issues.

“As a result the content stays available for longer,” the IWF said. “There is more opportunity for sexual predators to view and share the child sexual images and videos, therefore increasing the re-victimisation of the child.”

Children aged 11 to 13 accounted for nearly half of all child abuse images flagged by the organisation in 2019, while while 45,744 were in the seven to 10 age category.

IWF figures showed hundreds of babies were subjected to the worst abuse, while girls featured far more often than boys.

Almost a third of web pages taken down contained self-generated imagery – content created using webcams and shared online, often after children have been groomed.

There are concerns that girls and boys are more vulnerable during lockdown, when both they and their abusers will be spending more time online.

The IWF flagged 130,915 images to be removed from the internet last year, up from 103,529 in 2018, and significantly higher than the 76,939 in 2017.

The vast majority of those images were hosted in the Netherlands where digital restrictions are much looser than in the UK.

Overall, nine in 10 of the images analysed in 2019 were hosted in Europe, with the Netherlands taking up the greatest share (71 per cent) followed by Slovakia (6 per cent) and the US (5 per cent). Fewer than 1 per cent of images were hosted in the UK.

But the National Crime Agency previously estimated that Britain is home to 300,000 people who pose a sexual threat to children online or in person.

“We have seen a real and frightening jump in the amount of child sexual abuse material that is being hosted right on our doorstep here in Europe,” said Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the IWF.

“No country is immune to this terrible criminality. Whilst the UK doesn’t have the hosting issue, our problem is that many consumers of child sexual abuse live here. We’ve got to fight this on both fronts – both the supply and the demand.”

Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC, said: “Hundreds of thousands of child abuse images continue to be accessed by offenders in the UK and more needs to be done to tackle the demand for and circulation of this terrible material.

“Tech firms should be required to proactively scan files being uploaded to cloud devices to identify and remove child abuse images before they can be shared more widely.”