Menu

Severity of videos

 

Frontline observations

In 2025 we assessed 63,682 videos showing child sexual abuse.

 

We saw a 50% increase in the number of videos we assessed as showing child sexual abuse.

The breakdown below shows the increase in actual numbers by severity across all categories.

  • Category A: 29% increase

  • Category B: 14% increase

  • Category C: 214% increase

Importantly, these percentages represent each category’s numerical increase as a proportion of last year’s total volume, not percentage growth within each category.

Some of these increases may be attributed to the fact that we reviewed a higher volume of video content than in previous years, which can naturally lead to more instances being identified and recorded. We began reviewing videos in 2023. 

Videos by severity over the past two years

The overall number of videos assessed by our team is influenced by a number of factors over the year including the amount of criminal imagery seen by our analysts on each actionable website they see, what the public are reporting to us and the types of data sets we are reviewing as part of our work with CAID.

Category A: Videos depicting penetrative sexual activity, sexual activity involving an animal, or sadistic conduct.
Category B: Videos depicting non-penetrative sexual activity.
Category C: Other indecent videos that do not fall within Categories A or B.

Category C includes, for example, videos showing partially nude, nude, or topless sexual posing.

 

IWF Image Classification Assessor
Frontline observations

Some readers may find the following descriptions distressing, please feel free to skip this section.

We assess videos of child sexual abuse material that can range from a GIF lasting a few seconds to a self-generated video lasting several hours. The emotional response of a child to direction, instruction or the action of abuse can be distressing for assessors to watch, which is why we usually analyse videos without sound. 

Assessors might see hundreds of children abused within a single video: a perpetrator could compile a series of composite images, screenshots of digital media files, spliced sexual abuse videos featuring multiple children, or the same child featured in multiple settings at different times. One video could contain the abuse of hundreds of children.  

We have seen more videos that depict what appears to be an adult recording themselves abusing a child. It seems performative, with the adult interacting with the recording device or viewers, as though it is possibly livestreamed. 

Videos can also be used to conceal child sexual abuse: sometimes the abuse imagery is spliced into mainstream digital movie files, disguising the purpose of the video to a casual observer.