New tech enables thousands of additional child victims to be counted in sexual abuse images for the first time

More child sexual abuse victims can now be ‘seen’ and counted than ever before, thanks to new tech that allows the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK’s front line against child sexual abuse imagery online, to record all the children seen in sexual abuse images. 

Since the beginning of the year, 60,604 additional children who would have previously been ‘invisible’ have been incorporated into a dataset that is used by tech companies and law enforcement to protect children around the world.  

This valuable information gives the IWF greater insight into the impact of child sexual abuse online and accounts for all the children seen abused in online imagery, a gap in knowledge that the child protection charity has urgently wanted to correct. 

The new feature is integrated as part of the IWF’s Intelligrade system, a powerful tool that enables the charity to accurately grade individual child sexual abuse images, while automatically generating unique hashes (digital fingerprints).  

The improvements to the IWF’s Intelligrade system were made possible through Nominet’s Countering Online Harms fund. Nominet is the public benefit company that operates the .UK web domain and works with charities and organisations that seek to improve lives through technology, developing ‘tech for good’. 

In Intelligrade, these hashes are enriched with contextual metadata, such as the age of the child in the image and the severity of the abuse seen. Previously, if an image featured more than one child, only information about the youngest child was able to be recorded. This approach was born out of the necessity to remove confirmed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the internet as swiftly as possible. Logging multiple ages could delay that process. 

Now, analysts can easily track information about all the children seen in the image with the Multichild feature. Being able to respond at speed and protect child victims from having horrific images of their suffering be uploaded, shared and viewed across the internet is a driving priority for analysts at the IWF. 

Hashed images are loaded on to the IWF Hash List which is then provided to companies, law enforcement agencies and governments around the world who cooperatively work to block and remove the criminal content.  

To date, there are more than two million hashes on the Hash List, preventing the abuse images from being shared again and again.  

Highly trained assessors at the IWF, who grade each image individually and document the details seen, say it gives them incredible satisfaction to be able to document all the children in the images.  

“At the end of every day, we feel great pride at knowing that we’ve been able to help as many victims as possible,” says Jennifer*, an image classification assessor at the IWF. 

“We can never forget that each image we see, and hash, features children being sexually abused and exposed to serious criminal activity, so it’s important that we record as much detail as we can from images that are essentially crime scenes.” 

Overall, image figures show that analysts have recorded 563,590 children so far this year, including images that feature a child on their own, ensuring that every child victim is now counted. This is a world first, making the IWF the only organisation that records every child victim seen in still images. 

This new capability provides vital intelligence to the tech industry, policy makers and police, helping them to fully understand the scale of abuse wrought against children. The deeper insight provided, such as identifying emerging trends or concerns, can bring about the development of better solutions to tackle CSAM online. 

Dan Sexton, Chief Technology Officer at the IWF, said: “This tech advancement significantly boosts our ability to capture more robust information about all the children featured in the child sexual abuse images that we assess. 

“To my knowledge we are now the only organisation in the world that can record information about all the victims seen in still images; images that can sometimes depict the most severe types of exploitation. 

“Being able to add in details for each individual child, recording their sex, age and skin tone will give the IWF a much richer, fuller picture about the impact of child sexual abuse online. 

“This way, every child is counted, which I know gives assessors much greater satisfaction in their challenging roles as they can now feel that they are helping even more children when the images are hashed and then removed or blocked online.” 

Paul Fletcher, CEO at Nominet, said: “We’re dedicated to making the internet a safer place for everyone. Our partnership with IWF enables them to innovate new technology to protect vulnerable children in the UK and around the world.  

“This latest breakthrough ensures that victims of online child sexual abuse, who were not previously recognised, are no longer hidden in the data. We believe this is crucial, not just on principle, but because it helps tech companies, including us at Nominet, to track trends and respond to this vital issue effectively.” 

The IWF works closely with UK police’s Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) and performs a vital role in assessing CSAM taken from devices during investigations. These images are then uploaded back into CAID with a full assessment, along with the different legal categories of child sexual abuse material which align with UK Sentencing Guidelines.  

The Home Office provides some funding to support the work that IWF assessors do to contribute gradings, intelligence and hashes to the national police database. 

Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, said: “Far too many children are being subjected to unimaginable child sexual abuse. As technologies advance, so do the threats to our children, so it is vital that we use tools such as these to ensure that we can safeguard as many children from abuse as possible. 

“The government is committed to working with child protection charities such as the Internet Watch Foundation, law enforcement partners and technology experts so that we can bring more perpetrators to justice and ensure victims receive the support they deserve.”  

So far this year, the new data can show that of the overall 563,590 victims documented, most of the children seen were between the ages of 7 and 10 (201,787). Girls made up the majority of the victims (430,463). 

*Jennifer is a pseudonym used to protect the assessor’s privacy.