New figures from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) 2006 Annual Report, launched today, show the severity of online child abuse content is increasing, with a four-fold rise in images depicting the most severe abuse, such as penetrative and sadistic sexual activity. This trend reflects an apparent growing demand for purchasing more severe images with nearly 60 per cent of commercial child abuse websites selling child rape images. Twenty-nine per cent of all potentially illegal child abuse URLs known to the IWF contain level four and five images.

The IWF also reveals that 80 per cent of the children in abusive images are female and 91 per cent appear to be under 12 years old.

The challenge to have commercial websites removed from the web is a still a serious one, with some of the most prolific sites avoiding closure by ‘hopping’ servers across different legal jurisdictions. One site, for example, has been reported 224 times to the IWF since 2002. This underlines the need for unified international efforts to combat child abuse content. Ninely per cent of commercial child abuse sites appear to be hosted in the US and Russia.

The Annual Report also reveals for the first time a significant increase in the abuse of photo sharing websites by offenders. In 2004, no images posted on photo album sites were added to the IWF’s database, however, they now account for 10.5 per cent of those URLs confirmed to have child abuse content.

eModeration is proud to be a member of the Internet Watch Foundation and we will continue to help fight illegal online content.

The full details of this report are available on the IWF website.