Highlights and awards

January

  • We partnered with the Marie Collins Foundation in a new campaign to call on young men to report self-generated sexual images of under 18s.
    Read our press release.

  • We launched a new reporting portal in Sierra Leone.

February

March

  • The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) published its report saying that IWF “sits at the heart of the national response to combating the proliferation of indecent images of children”.
    Read our press release.

  • We teamed up with comedian Arron Crascall, football YouTuber Eman Sv2 and our partner the Marie Collins Foundation to raise awareness of the important issue of child sexual abuse imagery online via social media.
    Read our press release.

  • We launched a reporting portal in Pakistan with the Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) Pakistan and the Global Fund to End Violence Against Children.
    Read our press release.

  • Coronavirus lockdown: We remained open and made big changes within our Hotline so we could safely do our work while looking after our staff.
    Read our press release.

April

  • We launched our first podcast series Pixels from a Crime Scene. It brought together global experts, victims, industry leaders, and even criminals for the first time to explore how children are being exploited by online predators.
    Read our press release.

  • We announced a significant breakthrough as our analysts cracked the codes used to share child sexual abuse material and increased our keywords list to more than 4,000 terms.
    Read our press release.

  • We released some data which showed three of our industry Members blocked at least 8.8 million attempts by UK internet users to access videos and images of children suffering sexual abuse during lockdown.

May

  • We worked with Twitter to boost an international online safety campaign for parents to support child safety during lockdown.
    Read our press release.

  • We launched two reporting portals in Haiti and Mali.
    Read our press release.

  • An independent study, Safer technology, safer users: The UK as a world leader in Safety Tech said that IWF is leading the fight against online criminals.
    Read the study.
    Read our press release.

June

  • We launched five reporting portals: Mongolia, Indonesia, Senegal, Malaysia and El Salvador.
    Read our press release.

July

  • Our Hotline saw a 50% increase in public reports of online child sexual abuse during the first lockdown.
    Read our press release.

  • The UK Safer Internet Centre took over as the new Secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Media, chaired by Chris Elmore MP. The APPG on Social Media was established in 2018 by the Royal Society for Public Health.
    Read our press release.

August

September

  • We launched a new reporting portal in Côte d’Ivoire in two languages: English and French.
    Read our press release.

  • Melissa Thompson, who suffered abuse as a child, organised the mammoth gaming session and raised more than £1,000 for our hotline.
    Read our press release.

October

  • We worked with the National Cyber Security Centre in the Ghanaian government, and UNICEF Ghana, to get the vital Ghana reporting portal up and running.
    Read our press release.

  • IWF Hotline Manager won Unsung Hero Award for “profound” contribution to keeping the internet safe.
    Read our press release.

  • The End Violence Fund announced they would be funding our new IWF reThink chatbot to engage with internet users who are showing signs that they might be looking for images of child sexual abuse.
    Read our press release.

  • Our Hotline experienced the highest number of public reports of suspected child sexual abuse material ever received in a single month.
    Read our press release.

November

December

  • We welcomed the new Online Harms measures announced by the UK Government.
    Read our press release.

  • We applauded tech companies’ decisions not to leave children “out in the cold” amid fears of “unacceptable” new EU ePrivacy rules which could make it easier for criminals to share videos of child sexual abuse and rape.
    Read our press release.