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IWF: 10 Successful Years of Fighting Internet Child Pornography

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) celebrated a decade of success, cracking down on illegal content on the internet. As part of its 10-year celebrations, the IWF revealed statistics that shows just how effective it has been in fighting the spread of child pornography in the UK, and the influence it has had on other countries around the globe.

The IWF was founded in 1996 to identify and remove illegal child abuse content on the internet. Since its inception, the foundation has processed an average of 1000 reports a month and has caused the removal of 30,000 sites. The foundation has come a long way since it first came into being. In its first year of operations, it received 615 reports, while in 2006 it has, to date, received 27,750 complaints.

The biggest contribution of the Internet Watch Foundation is undoubtedly its success in bringing down drastically the number of UK hosted websites that carried child pornography material, from 18% in 2006 to a minute 0.2% today. To date, 51% of these type of sites are hosted in the US, 20% in Russia, 7% in Spain and 5% in Japan. Other facts revealed by the IWF shows that 79% of the children featured in these sites were female. Also, from the people who reported these incidents, there was a 50/50 split between those who placed the reports anonymously and those who gave their personal details.