Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the number of child sexual abuse images online in each of the last five years; and if he will make a statement.

Whilst there is no definitive number of child sex abuse images online, industry made over 10m referrals to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2017, and the Internet Watch Foundation last year processed 132,636 reports in 2017 (26% increase on 2016).

As well as working closely with the IWF, including the sharing of hashes with industry, the UK Government has invested in Project Arachnid – a tool that crawls the web to find indecent imagery and get it removed. It has issued approximately 1 million notices to service providers.

In September 2018, the Home Secretary called on industry to raise their response online child sexual exploitation and abuse, including to block child sexual abuse material as soon as companies detect it being uploaded. The Home Office and DCMS are also developing a White Paper which will set out a range of legislative and non-legislative measures to counter online harms and set clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep UK citizens safe online. Protecting children from exploitation and abuse online will be a central component of the White Paper.