80 percent of Internet child porn victims under 10 years old

Davey Winder
Sunday, 26 October 2008 15:50

Business IT - Networking

The true horror of Internet child pornography has been revealed by the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK organisation that works with law enforcement agencies to help prevent such abuse. Be warned, this story does not make for happy reading...

The Internet Watch Foundation is a British organisation that works closely with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre and other law enforcement agencies to encourage the reporting of child porn online.

It helps Internet Service Providers and web hosting companies within the United Kingdom to combat the abuse of their networks by paedophiles by way of a national 'notice and take down' service to alert them to potentially illegal content.

Beyond this, IWF also provides data to law enforcement agencies both in the UK and abroad to help assist with investigations into the distribution of such illegal content.

A new survey by the IWF has shown that less than 1 percent of child porn can be traced back to UK servers, so much of its work is in facilitating an industry-led block list initiative to protect users from inadvertent exposure.

That new survey, published to coincide with IWF Awareness day, also reveals the truly shocking statistic that 80 percent of the children featured in these sickening images accessed by the IWF are under 10.

33 percent are under 3, and 10 percent are under 2.

Such figures make you appreciate why the Internet Watch Foundation itself does not refer to these collectively as being child pornography or kiddie porn, as it insists that these terms just serve to legitimise images which are not pornography.

Instead, it says that they are actually permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as 'child sexual abuse images.' To be honest, semantics and language aside, it does not matter what you call them: this is a sickening and evil trade that needs to be policed and prevented.

So what else did the Internet Watch Foundation research reveal? More shocking statistics on page 2...

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