Internet Watch Foundation

Accounts clerk Andrew Tatam, 34 from Spalding Lincolnshire was jailed yesterday for 5 years for possessing almost half a million indecent images of children.

 

Tatam apparently began collecting the images in late 1997 and Police raided his home in 2002 after his credit card details were found on a US website. Detectives taking part in the national Operation Ore search for internet paedophiles said that the cache was the largest collection yet unearthed.

 

The central remit of the Internet Watch Foundation is combating child abuse images online. We support the police by providing an internet ‘hotline’ service for the public to report their exposure to child abuse images.

 

99% of child abuse content is traced to foreign territories and so outside the jurisdiction of the British Police.
By undertaking this role and operating the hotline, the IWF frees up time for British police officers to concentrate on detecting offenders in Britain.

 

Our ‘hotline’ processed approximately 20,000 reports in 2003, a 9% increase on the previous year. That equates to 400 reports of potentially illegal content every week or 80 reports every day. In 1997, a few months after the inception of the IWF, 18% of potentially illegal content was hosted by UK ISPs now that figure is now less than 1%. Our records show that 55% of child abuse content is hosted in the US and 23% is traced to Russia.

 

Peter Robbins, CEO, IWF said:

“ This sentence demonstrates the effectiveness of police operations targeting this type of crime and shows that it is important to have stringent legislation for offences concerning child abuse images, which we have in the UK. We would like to see broader consensus & co-operation at an international level, including a review of the mechanisms and laws currently in place, to further address the problems surrounding this type of material, the majority of which is currently being hosted overseas.”

 

A full report of the work of the IWF including key significant trends and figures will be released this month in the 2003 Annual Report.