Intimate Image Abuse: Internet

(asked on 17th January 2024) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for what reason 15,000 non-consensual images reported as part of Operation Makedom remain online; and what steps he is taking to seek the removal of that content.


Answered by
Laura Farris Portrait
Laura Farris
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ministry of Justice) (jointly with Home Office)
This question was answered on 22nd January 2024

The Online Safety Act gained Royal Assent in October 2023 and seeks to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. It will, for the first time, place clear legal duties on technology companies to take proactive steps to identify, remove and prevent users encountering illegal content, including child sexual abuse material and non-consensually shared intimate images from their platforms. The Act also updates and improves legislation relating to the taking and sharing of intimate images.

The Government has funded the Revenge Porn Helpline to support victims of non-consensual intimate image sharing, colloquially known as ‘revenge porn’. since it was established in 2015. The Home Office is providing £150k to the Helpline in 2023/24.

The Home Office has developed the world-leading Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) which brings together all the images that the Police and NCA encounter. We have provided the Internet Watch Foundation with a connection to CAID, enabling them to share the images’ unique identifiers – called hashes - to allow more child sexual abuse material online to be identified and removed. Home Office investment also supports the National Crime Agency to remove the most horrific child sexual abuse material from the internet, including on the dark web.

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