The fact that less than 1% of criminal content is hosted in the UK is partly due to our excellent working relationships with UK police forces and agencies.
We share images we find online with the National Crime Agency’s CEOP Command so they can do the important work of rescuing the children in the images and videos. We also refer requests for safeguarding directly to CEOP and local police authorities.
In cases where additional information would help verify a victim’s age, our police partners are able to validate supporting documents.
We also regularly check URLs for child sexual abuse images on behalf of UK police forces and communicate our assessments to them.
Informing international police of criminal content
When we trace the content as being hosted in a country with an INHOPE hotline, we contact the relevant hotline through our INHOPE membership.
We work directly with law enforcement in countries where there is no INHOPE hotline to speed up the removal of child sexual abuse images and videos. We also have police partners in several of our reporting portal countries.
We recently streamlined the way we report to an international police force, and now we send alerts to a dedicated task force every time we find child sexual abuse images hosted in the country.
Working with the relevant police agency allows them to confirm whether they are already investigating the criminals behind the images. Cooperating in this way can also lead to the children pictured in the images and videos being rescued.
Mutual training sessions
We enjoy a strong working relationship with our police partners. We take part in two-way training sessions with the police, for example regarding image assessment, website tracking, and international tracing techniques. This ensures our procedures and judgements are up to date, informed by the most recent case laws, and reflect decisions being made by our police partners. It also means we can share our specific skills with police officers increasingly operating in the criminal online environment.