Please note, some of the descriptions within this report are really very very distressing, and some may want to avoid reading the full press release.
This is just an extract:
Analysts at the child protection charity found nearly 900 instances of the most severe form of child sexual abuse material, Category A, .
All the criminal content analysed in the study had been shared online by an abuser, or abusers, coercing a child via an internet-connected device with a camera. The abuser was remote to the child.
Proposed safety laws to protect children from being exploited online are now at risk as the Government’s flagship Online Safety Bill suffers delays in Parliament and IWF CEO Susie Hargreaves OBE is urging Government to make children’s safety online a priority and return the Bill to Parliament as soon as possible.
Among the Category A images and videos identified, 889 contained girls, six contained both boys and girls and one contained boys only.
In her final report in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Professor Alexis Jay OBE, the inquiry’s chair, calls for plain and clear language to be used when talking about child sexual abuse. She said in her opening statement to the final report:
“We also need to use the correct words to describe the actions of abusers – masturbation, anal and oral rape, penetration by objects – these words are still not considered acceptable terms by many in public and private discourse. Every incident of abuse is a crime and should not be minimised or dismissed as anything less, or downplayed because descriptions of the abuse might cause offence.”
She is right. And it is thanks to her remarks that IWF has decided to make this data publicly available, and to describe what we’re seeing as accurately as we can.
www.iwf.org.uk/news-media/news/children-coerced-to-insert-household-objects-into-themselves-including-a-toothbrush-and-a-recorder-for-online-predators-pleasure/