Published: Tue 23 Apr 2024
Last year was the “most extreme year on record” for child sexual abuse online, U.K.-based charity Internet Watch Foundation warned on Tuesday, citing a disturbing rise in explicit materials that predators coerced victims into making—urging tech companies and online platforms to take swift action amid sluggish regulation and rising dangers from artificial intelligence.
The IWF, a charity that helps identify and remove child sexual abuse imagery online, said it found a 275,652 webpages containing, advertising or linking to child sexual abuse imagery in 2023, a new record.
“Each URL could contain one, tens, hundreds or even thousands of individual child sexual abuse images or videos,” the report said, nearly all of which (92%) contained self-generated content where the “victim had been coerced, blackmailed, or groomed into performing sexual acts over a webcam.”
The figure, which IWF said was obtained through “proactive searching” and analyzing nearly 400,000 reports coming in from more than 50 reporting portals around the world, marks an 8% increase from the year before.
Read the full article at Forbes.
The girl sent a photo to a boy in her class before the image and her phone number were added to all-male online chat groups - she later started disappearing before being abused by "unknown men".
