We gain extensive and valuable data through the rigorous analysis and assessment of child sexual abuse material by IWF analysts. This information gives us insight into the trends, tactics and behaviours documented and improves our understanding of the child sexual abuse environment online.
By sharing this intelligence with law enforcement, policy makers, child protection NGOs, IWF Members and others, we can help to inform methods for tackling the spread of child sexual abuse material and better protect children.
In this section, we provide a detailed breakdown of our data and some analysis of both the reports we’ve assessed, and the more than 700,000 individual criminal images and videos that we’ve assessed in 2024.
Our analysis looks at the techniques used to extort and create child sexual abuse content, such as sexually coerced extortion and AI-generated imagery, and explains where the content is physically hosted on servers around the world.
We also explore methods criminals use to distribute and spread child sexual abuse material – particularly for financial gain – such as ICAP sites and disguised websites.
As explained in our key notes, there are also changes in how some of the data is presented this year, as we work to continually review and improve our efforts to stop child sexual abuse online.
For more information on the data that we record please see our methodology and datasets page.
