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Types of reports

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The IWF’s mission is to detect, disrupt, remove and prevent online child sexual abuse imagery. Our analysts assess each report against UK legal guidelines.  

Reports processed in 2025

451,186

6% increase on the number of reports assessed from 2024:

  • 449,549 were reports of URLs 
  • 2,078 were from child reporting services (451 contained URLs included in the number above)
  • 10 were reports of newsgroups.  

287,270 (64%) came from the proactive work of our analysts.  

This equates to one report every 70 seconds.  

 

311,599 reports were confirmed to either contain criminal imagery of child sexual abuse, link to this illegal imagery or were found advertising it (a 7% increase from 2024).  

 

  • 310,338 were URL's.
  • 1,261 were reports received from our child reporting services (99 contained URLs included in the number above)

Every 101 seconds a report showed a child being sexually abused.   

 

Every report to the IWF represents either a single URL or a direct report via our child reporting services (Report Remove and Meri Trustline).   

Each URL could contain one, tens, hundreds or even thousands of individual child sexual abuse images or videos.  

Many sites directly display child sexual abuse imagery, however, we also take action on sites that facilitate or enable others to commit offences involving the access, possession, or distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). These include:

  • Gateway or referral sites that link to child sexual abuse content
  • Advertisements for such material
  • Manuals that provide instructions or guidance on how to locate or perpetrate abuse
  • Non-clickable links (Inchoate sites) that share information (such as URLs) enabling others to locate criminal content.

Below is a breakdown of the non-image based sites we actioned in 2025.

Non image based criminal URLs

Analyst Insight

This year, inchoate reports have become a key tool for disrupting material that encourages or assists the offence of sharing child sexual abuse material. While most of our reports are of images and videos depicting abuse, we also see bad actors attempting to evade detection by signposting to criminal material so discreetly that only a trained eye would recognise what is being communicated. They might try to direct other bad actors from one platform to another, or use seemingly innocuous keywords to advertise the sale of child sexual abuse material. 

The clearest example of this is bad actors posting links to abuse material as plain text rather than clickable hyperlinks. Previously, analysts couldn't categorise this as criminal or request the removal of the plain text, leaving platforms vulnerable and the public at risk of encountering it. Leaving these ‘plain text’ links online did not fully resolve the issue or disrupt the activity.  

Inchoate reports closed that gap. In this context, ‘inchoate’ means incomplete and not fully formed, and that's exactly what these plain text links are. Had they been clickable hyperlinks, we could have removed them as direct pathways to criminal material.  

We were seeing this methodology being exploited with increasing frequency, presumably to avoid detection or removal. After raising this issue with CPS (Crown Prosecution Service), they agreed that under the Serious Crime Act 2007, posting these links still signifies action toward committing a crime, even with a missing piece - such as no hyperlink.  

This can help show bad actors that certain internet spaces are not safe havens for promoting and distributing illegal material. Where we can, we continue to strive to cut off these signposts to child sexual abuse material.