Source: Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published on this website Friday 15 November 2024 by Jill Powell
More child sexual abuse victims can now be ‘seen’ and counted than ever before, thanks to new tech that allows the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK’s front line against child sexual abuse imagery online, to record all the children seen in sexual abuse images.
Since the beginning of the year, 60,604 additional children who would have previously been ‘invisible’ have been incorporated into a dataset that is used by tech companies and law enforcement to protect children around the world.
This valuable information gives the IWF greater insight into the impact of child sexual abuse online and accounts for all the children seen abused in online imagery, a gap in knowledge that the child protection charity has urgently wanted to correct.
The new feature is integrated as part of the IWF’s Intelligrade system, a powerful tool that enables the charity to accurately grade individual child sexual abuse images, while automatically generating unique hashes (digital fingerprints).
The improvements to the IWF’s Intelligrade system were made possible through Nominet’s Countering Online Harms fund. Nominet is the public benefit company that operates the .UK web domain and works with charities and organisations that seek to improve lives through technology, developing ‘tech for good’.
In Intelligrade, these hashes are enriched with contextual metadata, such as the age of the child in the image and the severity of the abuse seen. Previously, if an image featured more than one child, only information about the youngest child was able to be recorded. This approach was born out of the necessity to remove confirmed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the internet as swiftly as possible. Logging multiple ages could delay that process.
Now, analysts can easily track information about all the children seen in the image with the Multichild feature. Being able to respond at speed and protect child victims from having horrific images of their suffering be uploaded, shared and viewed across the internet is a driving priority for analysts at the IWF.
Hashed images are loaded on to the IWF Hash List which is then provided to companies, law enforcement agencies and governments around the world who cooperatively work to block and remove the criminal content.
To date, there are more than two million hashes on the Hash List, preventing the abuse images from being shared again and again.
Highly trained assessors at the IWF, who grade each image individually and document the details seen, say it gives them incredible satisfaction to be able to document all the children in the images.
