Where our reports come from

Over the past year, our Hotline assessed 424,047 reports of child sexual abuse material and actioned 291,273 reports confirmed to contain criminal imagery.

Reports made to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) come from the public, our partners and proactive searching. Each report is manually assessed by our Hotline team at our headquarters in the UK.  

The public can make reports to us via our website, or through one of the 50+ Reporting Portals around the world, available in more than 19 languages. These portals provide the public with a safe and confidential place to report online child sexual abuse.

Our partners, whether that’s law enforcement agencies, international hotlines, other stakeholders working in the child protection sector or one of the 200+ IWF Members, report content they suspect may contain child sexual abuse to us, by reaching out to our Hotline, using our reporting portals, or using an intuitive API.
 
Our Hotline became one of just two civilian-staffed bodies allowed to search for child sexual abuse online in April 2014. This has now expanded to include a small number of other hotlines. Since then, the IWF have been able to actively search the internet for child sexual abuse and create reports for action by our analysts. We call this ‘proactive searching’, and it accounts for a large proportion of our work.

Thanks to the many ways our Hotline are able to acquire reports of child sexual abuse material, they are able to assess hundreds of thousands of reports against UK legal guidelines each year.

 

Below, you can find a breakdown of where our reports came from in 2024.

 

Report analysis

 

External vs proactive - reports assessed and the proportion actioned

External vs proactive - reports assessed and the proportion actioned

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This chart compares proactively sourced URLs (where our analysts search for child sexual abuse imagery) and URLs or imagery reported to us via external sources. Assessed refers to all reports that have been reviewed whereas actioned refers to the number of those found to contain criminal content.

 

Reports that we received from the public that we took action on only account for 8% of our total actioned number of reports. This is most often because the content reported either does not meet the threshold under UK law or what is being reported to us is outside of the IWF’s remit. 

External reports - % of each source that accurately led to child sexual abuse imagery

This chart shows the percentage of reports which were actionable (contained child sexual abuse material) from each external source. 

‘Other’ refers to charities and other stakeholders working within the child protection sector.

Note: These percentages exclude newsgroups and duplicate/'previously actioned' reports.

Aside from our proactive work, we receive a high volume of reports from the public (154,295 received this year) along with a smaller number from other sources such as, the police, IWF Members, hotline agencies and other charities and stakeholders in the child protection sector. 

 

 

Public report source accuracy

154,295 reports assessed by our Hotline came from the public. 27% of these were correctly identified as containing child sexual abuse content (34% in 2023). This figure includes newsgroups and duplicate reports (where the same URL showing criminal content has been reported multiple times). 

Note: Each year, a number of these reports concern adverts, direct links or indirect pathways to child sexual abuse imagery which are assessed as criminal but won't have a severity grade.