Source: Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published on this website Thursday 23 January 2025 by Jill Powell
A letter has been written to Sir Keir Starmer on 22 January 2025 from the IWF to warn that, without his intervention, the new Online Safety Act will be a missed opportunity to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse imagery online. This comes as the IWF, which is the UK’s front line against online child sexual abuse, publishes new data revealing 2024 as the worst year on record for online child sexual abuse imagery.
The IWF says Sir Keir, who first authorised the charity to start proactively hunting down child sexual abuse imagery when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service CPS, n 2014, is in a unique position to intervene again and make sure the Online Safety Act does not become a missed opportunity to revolutionise online safety.
The letter coincides with new data from the IWF which shows that in 2024, the IWF acted to remove images or videos of children suffering sexual abuse, or links to that content, on 291,270 webpages. Each page can contain at least one, if not hundreds or thousands, of images and videos.
This is the most child sexual abuse webpages the IWF has ever discovered in its 29-year history and is a five per cent increase on the 275,650 webpages identified in 2023.
In 2014, the IWF began to proactively seek out and remove child sexual abuse imagery from the internet having been granted new powers by Sir Keir in his role as Director of Public Prosecutions. Before then, the IWF could only legally respond to reports made by the public, tech companies or the police.
The powers granted by Sir Keir had a dramatic effect on the amount of child sexual abuse material the IWF was able to uncover, with 2024’s figures showing an 830 per cent increase on the 31,260 webpages found when proactive detection began.
