Online child abuse on the rise – Internet Watch Foundation

The Internet Watch Foundation has expressed worry over the rising trend of online sexual abuse cases among children, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Foundation has been noticing the sudden rise in sexual abuse incidents.

Miss Zoe Colpaert, the International Development Officer of the Foundation, in an interview with UniversNews stated that in each year, cases of online child sexual abuse increase significantly.

She said 260,126 cases of online child abuse, representing 40%, were recorded in 2019 alone, however, the period between January and July in 2020 saw a marginal increase of 10%.

“Every year the number of reports grows, from 2019 we’ve got an increase of 40%, in 2019 alone we had about 260,126 reports. Also from January to July 2020, we had 50% more reports especially during the covid-19 lockdown,” she indicated.

The Marketing Manager of the Internet Watch Foundation, Thomas Dyson highlighted how to report online sexual abuse content to their outfit.

He advised the public to report anonymously with the URL link to the content.

“Members of the public can report to us anonymously, all they have to do is to copy and paste the URL of what they have seen or suspect to be online child sexual abuse.

“They will have to paste it to our website, our analyst will assess the content and if it proves to be criminal in nature and have scenes of children being sexually abused, we will work with our partners to have that content removed immediately,” he directed.

He further assured the public that data in their outfit are safe and secured from a third party, adding that industry-standard inscriptions are used on all their data.

“In the last 25 years or so we haven’t had issues with data been lost or stolen, we work with a tech company because security is of Importance to us, so the data we gather is extremely safe,” he unequivocally stated.