There has been a 1,000% increase in web pages showing self-generated sexual abuse imagery of primary school children since 2019, a safety group has said. The Internet Watch Foundation said it has seen a 1,058% increase in the number of web pages showing sexual abuse images and videos of children aged 7-10 who had recorded themselves.
The IWF recorded 63,050 reports related to self-generated sexual abuse imagery of children in 2022, compared to 5,443 in 2019. The group said that in many cases the children had been groomed, coerced, or tricked into performing sexual acts on camera by an internet predator.
The charity, which finds and removes child sexual abuse imagery from the internet, warned that the pandemic allowed internet predators greater access to children. Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the IWF, said: “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have all adjusted our lives to be more online than ever before, and that is not going to change.
