New study reveals child sexual abuse content as top online concern and potentially 1.5m adults have stumbled upon it

More people in Britain are concerned about websites showing the sexual abuse of children than other types of illegal, illicit or ‘harmful’ internet content. However, more than half of people in Britain currently say that they either wouldn’t know how to report it if they were to encounter it (40%) or would just ignore it (12%).

The ComRes poll conducted among a representative sample of 2058 British adults for the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) shows the vast majority of people in Britain think that child sexual abuse content (“child pornography”) (91%) and computer generated images or cartoons of child sexual abuse (85%) should be removed from the internet.

Christian Berg, CEO at NetClean commented:

"Every image of abuse isn´t just a collection of offensive pixels. Every image shows a victim, a victim that according to the IWF research, only 48 per cent of British adults would help to save.

The anonymity of the internet allows us to assume that these issues are someone else´s problem. Images of child sexual abuse are symptoms of a wider societal problem, one that is everyone's responsibility to prevent and disrupt. Whilst organisations like the IWF do a fantastic job to tackle URL's hosting this content, it's important that everyone does their part, whether that's flagging sites to the IWF, reporting abuse to the police or ensuring that all networks are hostile to distributors of child sexual abuse."