Tech Shout!

According to Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), images of child abuse that are posted and sold online are fast becoming more graphic and sadistic and sadly, involve younger children.

In its annual report, the Internet Watch Foundation said that in the last three years there has been a four-fold increase in the number of images involving severe abuse (penetrative and sadistic sexual activity).

The British-based Internet monitoring group also said that nearly 60 per cent of all commercial child abuse Web sites now sells images of child rape.

According to Peter Robbins, IWF’s chief executive, “Sadly we have to report new trends regarding the young age of the child victims in the images we assess and the dreadful severity of abuse they are suffering.”

The IWF group also said that the number of reports of child pornography it had received in 2006 had risen by 34 per cent when compared to the previous year. It found that 8 per cent of those in the abusive images were female and 91 per cent appeared to be under 12 years of age.

“This is babies, toddlers and pre-pubescent children suffering some of the most horrific abuse. Sadly the commercial sites are just responding to a demand by people around the world to buy that level of image. If there’s profit to be made they will carry on doing it. The vast majority of Web sites were linked to the United States or Russia, where they are often run by organized criminal gangs.” said an IWF spokeswoman.

The IWF now says that its main challenge is to try and target the commercial Web sites that keep ‘server-hopping’ to different servers all around the world.