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Watchdog Employee Opens Up About Having To Find Child Sex Abuse Images Every Day

Watchdog Employee Opens Up About Having To Find Child Sex Abuse Images Every Day

The Internet Watch Foundation removes thousands of images of child abuse every year

Dominic Smithers

Dominic Smithers

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) works tirelessly to remove indecent images of children from the web, deleting thousands every year.

The task is carried out by a team of 13 analysts, with each member trawling the internet and taking down some of the most horrific films and photographs of children being abused and raped across the world.

To prepare them for the role they are shown indecent images during their interview, and once they take the job have to attend mandatory counselling sessions every month.

Speaking to LADbible, one of the foundation's analysts - who wished to remain anonymous - said he's managed to build up resilience, but is still angered by what he sees.


He said: "You come across really bad images, stuff you just wouldn't believe. Some of the different pictures and videos have a level of violence and torture and they are the ones that stay with me the most.

"I remember one particularly awful video and it wasn't just sexual abuse, there was a level of violence and torture in the video and the youngest child was 18 months old, very young.

"That was really hard to see for the first time. And every now and again you just need to go out and take a breather to re-centre yourself.

"I think if you ask any analyst they will say the same, they will all have one or two images or videos that stay with them and affect them a bit more than the others."

He added: "You can definitely get angry. Particularly images or videos in which the children may be getting violently tortured as well as sexually abused. Seeing babies being abused would make most people angry.

"But everyone who works here is very supportive of each other, which help us deal with what we see."

Last year the IWF removed more than 100,000 websites showing the abuse of children.
IWF

Every day, the team have to search through a list of 2,000 sites known to promote the abuse of children, and then get to work to delete any illegal content they come across and have the URLs taken down.

This is on top of the hundreds of reports they receive from the public.

But with thousands of images on any site, the analyst said you can quickly find yourself falling down a 'rabbit hole', with no end in sight.

He said: "You could spend a day taking images down from one site and then you come in the next day, go on a different website and the same images pop up again."

But despite the frustration of often having to remove the same image multiple times, he says he is 'immensely proud' of the organisation's work.

"Anything we can do to stop people stumbling across these images and stopping victims being re-victimised makes me proud.

"We sometimes have young people contact the hotline asking for sexual images of themselves to be removed that have been uploaded without their consent and being able to help people like that makes me really proud."

Analysts can have to look at hundreds of images of child abut a day.
IWF

One of the main concerns for the IWF, which was founded in 1996, is that this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

With many illegal operations hiding behind adult porn sites, people are at risk of stumbling across the content by accident.

A recent study from Ipsos MORI found that young men (18-24) might not even recognise an illegal image of a child if they saw one - potentially leaving thousands more images in circulation.

According to the survey, 30 per cent of young men don't think it's illegal to download, view or share indecent images of children when they appear without nudity, while 27 per cent couldn't recognise it if they appear to agree to take part in the picture.

The worrying stats have now led to a campaign, urging young men who may accidentally come across child abuse online, to report it.

A spokesperson for the IWF said: "If you are say a young man curiously searching for perfectly legal sex/pornography sites, or someone just on a perfectly legal pornography site, you might fairly easily stumble across something you realise is - or are suspicious is - an image of a baby or a child being abused. And, like the Sock campaign says, that's when it needs reporting."

For more information or to report an image or video, click here

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: World News, UK News, Interesting