The Hotline is split into two workstreams as seen in the diagram below, which includes assessments of both reports and imagery.
The majority of our work (63%) comes from proactive searching online; however, we also receive reports from external sources. These include the public, the police, IWF Members, hotline agencies and other charities and stakeholders in the child protection sector. In addition, we receive reports from our child reporting services, Report Remove and Meri Trustline, where children are able to report URLs or their own illegal imagery.
These reports are analysed by our Internet Content Analysts who determine if the content reported is criminal according to UK Law. URLs found to be criminal are actioned and listed on our IWF URL list for our Members.
If a child reports a URL this will follow our report assessment process, if they report criminal imagery this will follow the criminal imagery process, both are set out in the workflow diagram above.
All criminal imagery is then uploaded to our Intelligrade system where our Taskforce Image Assessors then provide analysis of each image or video. These assessments provide data insights based on the images, videos or children seen. All imagery will be given a severity assessment and included on the IWF Hash list.
The IWF has access to the government’s Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) in order to assess images and videos from it. This data is then shared to support law enforcement and contributes to the IWF Hash List to help the tech sector find and remove copies of known child sexual abuse images online.
Our Quality Assurance team provide an independent audit across both workstreams within the Hotline to ensure accuracy and consistency.
This year we have been able to provide more detailed analysis focusing on different areas of our work. Image, video and child analysis are a new focus for 2024. We have created six dataset tags to clearly identify what data and what part of our workstream is being referred to throughout all sections of our report.