Internet Watch Foundation

Our launch conference was a great success. With nearly 200 delegates representing industry, child protection, teachers, police, IT professionals, Government and associated organisations and charities, we were delighted with the turn out. Home Office Minister, Vernon Coaker MP, kindly supported the IWF by giving a keynote address on the IWF’s history and success as well as an insight into the issue of child abuse images online and Government initiatives to combat this and associated crimes.

 

IWF Chair, Amanda Jordan OBE, introduced the event, outlining those individuals and organisations which have contributed to the development of the IWF over the past decade.

 

The panel discussion was a highlight. Hosted by Kurt Barling, BBC London’s Special Correspondent and with experts including: Peter Robbins, IWF CEO; Jim Gamble, CEOP CEO; Sonia Livingstone, LSE and IWF; Camille de Stempel, AOL, ICRA, ISPA and IWF; and Zoë Hilton, NSPCC, if was an insightful, useful and progressive discussion.

 

We hope those of you who attended found the event useful and informative.

 

We will report on our regional conferences (Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Bristol) in next month’s newsletter. Meanwhile, the IWF would like to express its gratitude to the delegates who attended the conferences, the speakers, the panellists and the venues, all of which provided the conference rooms for free.

 

The media coverage generated so far by our ten year anniversary conferences has been outstanding. With nearly 100 print articles, over 50 bogs and around 20 interviews, we are very pleased that so many people in the UK and around the world have found out more about the work and success of the IWF as well as how to have illegal online images removed.

 

There has been a particularly impressive take-up of the story internationally including a number of ‘firsts’ for the IWF and our agency, iris PR.

 

We had two great articles on the BBC website and for a while, were the 3^rd most read story, we were one of the biggest discussion topics on Russian blogs and have been in publications as diverse as the Strait Times - Singapore’s national newspaper, Japan Times and Reuters India, Moscow Times, The Royal Gazette – Bermuda’s only daily newspaper, Scarborough Evening News, The Barnsley Star and the Daily Mail.

 

Please see the Other Relevant News section in the newsletter for examples of media coverage.

 

To coincide with its ten year anniversary activities the IWF and its PR and creative agencies – iris – have recently developed a new advertising campaign. The adverts can be seen now and during coming weeks around the country on billboards, bus shelters and phone boxes and have also been designed in online formats.

 

This is the IWF’s first large-scale public facing awareness campaign and, together with the impact of our conferences and media coverage, we hope to have made many more of the UK public and indeed, the world’s public, aware of our work, our success and the online reporting mechanism we operate for illegal images on the internet.

 

Click here to see photos from the conference.