New technology powers the fight against child abuse images

A groundbreaking advancement in technology is enabling the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to record thousands more child victims in sexual abuse images, dramatically improving efforts to protect the world’s vulnerable children online.

Established more than 28 years ago, IWF is a charity based in the UK and operating globally to find, document, and remove child sexual abused material (CSAM). Its new capability, powered by an upgrade to its Intelligrade system, has this year allowed over 60,000 additional children to be included in databases used by tech companies and law enforcement to block and remove illegal content from the internet.

Overall, nearly 540,000 children have been recorded by analysts in 2025 alone, bringing into sharp relief the scale of the problem facing organisations like IWF, itself the largest in Europe and a leading contributor to an international network of organisations battling the scourge of online child sexual abuse.

“It’s important that we record as much detail as we can from images that are essentially crime scenes,” says Jennifer (not her real name), one of IWF’s bank of highly trained analysts. “We can never forget that each image we see features children being sexually abused.”

In the past, limitations in technology prevented the IWF from recording every individual child visible in abusive images. If an image depicted more than one child, only information about the youngest was often recorded to help minimise the time taken to document and act on the material.

With the enhanced multi-child tracking feature – a world first – IWF analysts can now log all children seen in abusive material, capturing a fuller picture of the victims of online child exploitation. 

The Intelligrade system not only allows for records to be produced of all victims, but also serves to assist analysts in grading the severity of offending material while automatically generating unique hashes – or digital fingerprints – for the images. Those hashes are then uploaded to IWF’s Hash List to be used by tech companies, law enforcement, and governments around the world.

IWF Chief Technology Officer Dan Sexton says the ability to record details for each child seen in still images – such as age, gender, skin tone, and other characteristics – has been transformative: “This tech advancement significantly boosts our ability to capture more robust information about all the children featured in the child sexual abuse images that we assess.

“To my knowledge we are now the only organisation in the world that can record information about all the victims seen in still images; images that can sometimes depict the most severe types of exploitation.

“This way, every child is counted, which I know gives assessors much greater satisfaction in their challenging roles as they can now feel that they are helping even more children when the images are hashed and then removed or blocked online.”

The upgrade to Intelligrade was made possible by funding from Nominet, the public benefit company managing the .UK web domain, through its Countering Online Harms fund.

Nominet CEO Paul Fletcher says the upgrade it has supported is an investment in its own ability to respond to the challenges it faces.

“We’re dedicated to making the internet a safer place for everyone. Our partnership with IWF enables them to innovate new technology to protect vulnerable children in the UK and around the world,” he says.

“This latest breakthrough ensures that victims of online child sexual abuse, who were not previously recognised, are no longer hidden in the data. We believe this is crucial, not just on principle, but because it helps tech companies, including us at Nominet, to track trends and respond to this vital issue effectively.”

In the UK, the IWF works closely with the police Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) by contributing hashes and detailed image assessments aligned with domestic legal guidelines for CASM. It receives government funding to sustain its involvement.