Our response to Chief Constable Simon Bailey's comments on child sexual abuse images

Chief Constable Simon Bailey made comments on paedophiles and child sexual abuse imagery on 28 February 2017. Read here or here.

IWF CEO Susie Hargreaves OBE said: "We work closely with the police and Chief Constable Simon Bailey. We're aware of the tremendous pressure on their workload and limited resources to tackle the problem. But there's no excuse to allow people get away with viewing child sexual abuse images - even a low level image is a real child being sexually abused.

It makes IWF's work to identify and remove child sexual abuse material online even more critical. Regardless of the severity of the abuse, at the heart is a real child victim - their abuse was real. Often one low level image leads to another image with more severe abuse.

We take a zero tolerance approach and we're world leaders. We identify thousands of images each week, almost none of them are hosted in the UK so we work internationally to have them removed."

Ends

Notes to editors:

Contact: Emma Hardy, IWF Director of External Relations +44 (0) 1223 203030 or +44 (0) 7929 553679.

A photograph of Claire Perry MP visiting IWF is available upon request.

What we do:

We make the internet a safer place. We help victims of child sexual abuse worldwide by identifying and removing online images and videos of their abuse. We search for child sexual abuse images and videos and offer a place for the public to report them anonymously. We then have them removed. We’re a not for profit organisation and are supported by the global internet industry and the European Commission.

We assess over 1,000 webpages per week. As a result of our work and self-regulatory model, known child sexual abuse content hosted in the UK has reduced from 18% in 1996 to 0.2% today

For more information please visit www.iwf.org.uk.

The IWF is part of the UK Safer Internet Centre, working with Childnet International and the South West Grid for Learning to promote the safe and responsible use of technology.