UK internet charity finds fourfold increase in child abuse imagery

LONDON (Reuters) - The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an online child sex abuse charity, said on Thursday that the number of reports of images and videos containing child abuse had increased by 417 percent over the last two years. In its annual report, the IWF said 68,092 reports had been positively identified as containing illegal child sexual abuse imagery and taken down. That represented a 118 percent increase over the previous year, it said. Prime Minister David Cameron gave his approval for the IWF to start proactively searching for online child sexual abuse imagery in April 2014. From that time, IWF analysts could themselves search for child abuse imagery rather than just acting upon reports they received, prompting a dramatic increase in the number of images identified. "By being allowed to actively search for these hideous images of children, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the sheer number of illegal images and videos that we’ve been able to remove from the internet," IWF CEO Susie Hargreaves said in a statement. Of the images discovered in 2015, 69 percent were of children aged 10 or under and 34 per cent were Category A which involves the rape or sexual torture of children, the IWF said. Hargreaves said the IWF planned to increase the number of its analysts to 17 from 12. The NSPCC children's charity called the IWF's removal of such images a significant achievement. "Each of these images is a crime scene and behind each crime scene a victim; it is horrifying that so much of the imagery features the rape or torture of very young children, the worst category possible,” it said in a statement. The IWF said Britain currently hosts 0.2 percent of the world's known child abuse imagery, a marked decline from 20 years ago when the figure was 18 percent. (Reporting by Bethany Rielly; editing by Stephen Addison)