15th Anniversary
On 26 October 2011 the IWF held an event at Westminster to mark 15 years of work with our members, stakeholders and partners.
We have created a short film of the event which is available on our YouTube channel.
In another way of marking our 15th anniversary, we have released some facts and figures spanning 15 years of work which illustrate what we’ve achieved and to illustrate the nature of child sexual abuse on the internet.
15 years of success
The time it takes to remove online child sexual abuse content has dropped dramatically. It has been virtually eradicated from UK networks with less than 1% hosted in the UK. On the rare occasion it is hosted here, it is removed within hours.
For content around the rest of the world, removal times are down from a month in 2009 to an average of just 12 days.
As a result, the number of URLs on our list has more than halved in two years from 1,200 in 2009 to 500 today. As the content is removed more quickly, there are many short lived URLs making the list far more dynamic in nature. During 2010 there were a cumulative total of 20,000 unique URLs on the IWF list.
15 years of change
In 1996 we had five funding members, now we have more than 100.
The number of web addresses reported to us has increased enormously. In our first year we had assessed 1,300 URLs, in 2010 we assessed more than 48,000.
In 2005 we received our 100,000th report to the Hotline. Six years later we’ve assessed almost 370,000 reports.
We started out with just four staff and a UK focus. Now we have 16 employees and a global influence tackling online child sexual abuse images.
15 years in numbers
Every image removed prevents a child’s re-victimisation. We have:
- Assessed more than 370,000 URLS;
- Worked with industry to remove 87,000 URLs hosting images of child sexual abuse.
Images and videos of child sexual abuse are evidence of crime scenes where real children have been exploited.
- 45% of the abused children are 10 years old and under.
- 15% are six years old and under.
- 77% are girls and 13% are both boys and girls.
- 40% of images depicted sexual activity with adults including the rape and sexual torture of the child.