About IWF

The IWF is a not-for-profit organisation that works towards the global elimination of child sexual abuse images and videos online. We help to make the internet a safer place for children and adults across the world.

We use cutting edge technology to find, remove, disrupt and prevent child sexual abuse imagery online and we provide a portfolio of tools and services to internet companies to help them keep their products and services safer for everyone. These are some of our tech-for-good tools:

• Image Hash List – We have a growing list of hashes (digital fingerprints) of child sexual abuse imagery. We use these hashes to help us find duplicate images of child sexual abuse. This makes us more efficient at what we do. Up to 99 pieces of data are recorded against each image. This helps us to build a growing picture of the nature of child sexual abuse imagery on the open internet.
• URL List – We provide a list of webpages containing child sexual abuse images and videos hosted outside of the UK to companies who want to block or filter them for their users’ protection, and to prevent the repeat victimisation of the children in the images. During 2022, the list was sent across all seven continents and a total of 230,922 unique URLs were included on the list. Each URL will contain one, to many tens, or hundreds of child sexual abuse images.

For 26 years we’ve given people a safe place to report criminal online child sexual abuse imagery anonymously, now covering over 50 countries and 2.6bn people. If you ever accidentally see sexual images or videos of children online, report safely at report.iwf.org.uk.