Images and videos of child sexual abuse on the internet have increased more than tenfold during the global pandemic and lockdown, new data shows.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) says its data highlights how child sex offenders have taken advantage of the situation.
When the global pandemic started in early 2020, such websites started gaining immense popularity on the internet.
The IWF counted more than 63,000 such web pages last year. Whereas before the pandemic it was only 5,000.
IWF Chief Executive Susie Hargreaves said: ‘During the global pandemic, the internet was a lifeline but we are only just beginning to know its full impact.’
He said that it is clear that child molesters often abuse children in their own bedrooms.
IVF collectively tracks, investigates and attempts to remove thousands of incidents of child sexual exploitation material from the Internet worldwide.
The voluntary organization says that the quality of its reporting has remained the same, but there has been an increase in such incidents compared to previous years.
Self-made videos and photos of child abuse make up two-thirds of the total content analyzed by analysts so far. This refers to cases of forced on-camera rape of children by Internet abusers.
Many of the videos are recorded or live streamed from bedrooms or bathrooms, with the voices of other people in the house playing in the background, the researchers say.
This is often done during live chats and recorded without the children’s knowledge and people sell these videos and photos.
The IWF is a UK-based organization and says that it is often difficult to identify where the children are from the videos. However, if they see school uniforms or other identification in a video, they report the matter to the authorities.
The organization estimates that more than 8,000 of these images and videos are of children aged seven to 10 and could be classified as Category A content.
This is the extreme type of classification and includes sexual activities such as penetration, sexual activities with an animal or pornographic images and videos.
A video seen by IWF analysts shows a nine-year-old girl on an online platform being instructed by adults to have sex in her bedroom while she plays with cuddly toys. I am surrounded by
This is interrupted when a family member, apparently unaware of the abuse, calls her for a bath.
The IWF is calling on the UK government to do more to protect children through the long-delayed Online Safety Bill.
The bill is currently being amended to potentially make technology platform owners criminally liable for any negligence or failure to prevent, identify and remove child sexual exploitation and abuse content. can go
But the IWF says the content it processes is coming from all over the world and is not being hosted in the UK for the most part.
The US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children does not have data for 2022, but reported an increase in child sexual exploitation material in 2021.
The charity’s cyber tipline received 29.4 million reports, up from 21.7 million in 2020.