The number of images and videos containing the most severe kinds of sexual abuse committed against children as young as newborns has more than doubled in the past two years, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said in a report out Tuesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th April, 2023) The number of images and videos containing the most severe kinds of sexual abuse committed against children as young as newborns has more than doubled in the past two years, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said in a report out Tuesday.
"The amount of Category A child sexual material discovered online has doubled since 2020, with newborn babies and toddlers among the victims of the most severe kinds of sexual abuse," the Cambridge-based watchdog said.
Per IWF's classification, Category A abuse includes rape, sadism and bestiality. It estimates that the share of such imagery among graphic materials involving children rose to 20% in 2022 from 17% in 2020.
The number of URLs confirmed to contain images or videos of children suffering sexual abuse stood at 255,570 in 2022, while the number of images involving Category A abuse of minors was up to a record 51,369 from 25,050 in 2020.
More than 80% of URLs containing sexual abuse imagery of children up to 2 years old was classified as Category A material. In the case of the imagery featuring children aged 3-6, that share stood at 50%.
Girls were by far the worst affected group, with 96% of the imagery, or 242,989 instances, involving female victims, but IWF estimated that the number of abused boys was up 137% last year to 6,253, up from 2,641 such instances recorded in 2021.
In 2020, the watchdog found 12,900 commercial webpages dedicated to the sexual abuse of children. This more than doubled in 2022, with 28,933 webpages being identified as commercial child sexual abuse sites.
"People are now only one click away from Category A material. That is a public safety issue. This extreme material is no longer in the creepy corners of the internet. It's in plain sight," a senior internet content analyst with the IWF said.
IWF chief executive Susie Hargreaves said criminal sites were looking for more and more insidious ways to profit form the sexual abuse of younger victims. Such webpages are mostly hosted by little-known companies based in Europe or Asia and the IWF is working to track these sites down and have them blocked.
