Published: Tue 25 Apr 2023
Written by: Aine Fox
Images of children aged as young as seven being abused online have risen by almost two thirds while the number of webpages found to contain the most extreme material has doubled in recent years, according to a report.
As children become more active online, they are growing in vulnerability to grooming and abuse by strangers ‘even in their own bedrooms’, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) warned.
The foundation, which is the UK organisation responsible for tracking down child sexual abuse imagery on the internet, found a record 51,370 of the webpages that it took action to remove or block from the internet in 2022 contained Category A child sexual abuse material.
This category can include the most severe kinds of sexual abuse.
Read more at Metro.
The girl sent a photo to a boy in her class before the image and her phone number were added to all-male online chat groups - she later started disappearing before being abused by "unknown men".
