"Devastating" Report Shows Thousands Of Children Under Six Being Sexually Abused Online

The Security Minister and the Internet Watch Foundation have urged technology firms to take "urgent action", as a "devastating" new report shows the extent of online sexual abuse and grooming being carried out against children under the age of six.

A new report by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the first analysis of its kind, has revealed widespread online sexual abuse of three to six-year-old children while they are using household devices.

Thousands of images and videos analysed by the IWF show children being manipulated into “disturbing” sexual acts on camera, including penetration, masturbation, bestiality, and sadism. Described as ‘self-generated’ child sexual abuse imagery, where the perpetrator is remote from the victim, these images and videos have then been shared by perpetrators on the open internet in the UK. 

This content could therefore be accessed by people in the UK, but did not necessarily only include victims from the UK itself – while the UK hosts relatively little child sexual abuse content, the National Crime Agency (NCA) has identified it as the third-largest global consumer of child sexual exploitation material.

2,401 individual self-generated images and videos of children aged three to six were discovered across 2023, 91 per cent of which were of girls. 15 per cent of this content showed the most extreme (Category A) forms of sexual abuse.

The data also showed a record number of webpages containing child sexual abuse overall, with 275,652 webpages discovered – each of which can contain thousands of images or videos. The nature of the abuse has also become more extreme, with a 22 per cent increase in 2023 of webpages containing Category A (involving penetrative sexual activity, sexual activity with