Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps the Government has taken to eliminate the circulation of indecent images of children online; and if she will make a statement.

Online Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) is an appalling crime that this Government is committed to stamping out. The Government’s response includes law enforcement agencies taking action against online offenders and working with the internet industry to remove illegal images.

We have significantly increased resources to the National Crime Agency leading to a near doubling of the CEOP Command’s investigative capability and have committed an additional £20 million over the spending review period to maintain this capability. Furthermore, the launch in 2015 of the Joint Operations Cell, a collaborative venture between the NCA and GCHQ, is targeting the most sophisticated online offenders.

All UK police forces and the National Crime Agency (NCA) are connected to the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) that was launched in 2014. CAID provides law enforcement agencies with effective tools to search seized devices for indecent images of children (IIOC), reduce the time taken to identify such images and increase the ability to identify victims.

Since 2015, nearly 36,000 known child sexual abuse images from CAID were assessed by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and shared with 6 major global technology companies, to enable their removal, and prevent the sharing, of images from their platforms and services.