Category Archives: Online abuse

Online child abuse survey finds third of viewers attempt contact with children

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Largest major survey of its kind finds 70% of respondents first saw child sexual abuse material when they were under 18

The largest major survey of people who watch online child sexual abuse has found that one-third of respondents attempted to directly contact a child as a result of the illegal images they watched online.

The survey, by Protect Children, a Finnish human rights group, was posted on the “dark web” so users would find it while actively searching for illegal content of children. The analysis was based on more than 5,000 people who responded initially to the survey about why and how they watched children being abused online, although 10,000 responses have been received so far.

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Sage members sent suspicious packages throughout pandemic, says leading scientist

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Prof Calum Semple and others advising government on Covid-19 response have been targeted by anti-vaxxers

Members of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have been sent suspicious packages and hate mail throughout the pandemic, one of the UK’s leading virologists has revealed.

Prof Calum Semple, a member of Sage and the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), said the incidents of abuse included one “particularly nasty” experience when he was targeted by anti-vaxxers.

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Bollywood’s Kareena Kapoor subject to online abuse over baby’s name

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Supporters say attacks over choice of name similar to 17th-century Muslim Mughal emperor rooted in prejudice against inter-faith marriage

Bollywood star Kareena Kapoor has received abuse online from extremists over her new baby’s name.

Kapoor has been attacked on social media for calling her second son Jehangir, the imperial name of the 17th-century Mughal emperor, which means “conqueror of the world”. Kapoor, a Hindu, and her husband, Saif Ali Khan, a Muslim and also a Bollywood star, have faced abuse for their marriage.

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‘Imperially nostalgic racists’ target Empireland author with hate mail

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Sathnam Sanghera speaks out against ‘vicious’ abuse he is receiving over his bestselling book: ‘Empire has been weaponised by the right wing, ever since Black Lives Matter’

Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland, a journey through Britain’s imperial past, has been a bestseller since it was pubished last month, acclaimed by critics as “unflinching … moving and stimulating” (the Guardian), and “excellent” and “balanced” (the Sunday Times). And yet, from the British public the author has received handwritten hate mail, and thousands of abusive tweets from “imperially nostalgic racists”, as he succinctly replied, some of them verging, he says, on death threats.

Related: Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera and Slave Empire by Padraic X Scanlan – review

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UK’s first football hate crime officer turns focus on social media

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Stuart Ward of West Midlands police aims to stamp out racist abuse in grounds and online to bring back community spirit

Since starting his role as the UK’s first football hate crime officer earlier this month, PC Stuart Ward has been busier than expected, considering football fans are banned from stadiums as part of the coronavirus lockdown.

Instead of jibes from the stands, players are now fielding more abuse on social media – just the other week, in Ward’s biggest case to date, West Midlands police arrested a man suspected of racially abusing West Bromwich Albion footballer Romaine Sawyers online.

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Rise in child abuse online threatens to overwhelm UK police, officers warn

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Exclusive: Sheer quantity of abusive material hindering detection while Facebook move to greater encryption is a further blow

The vast, and growing, volume of child abuse material being created and shared online is threatening to overwhelm police efforts to tackle it, senior officers have told the Guardian.

And the situation is likely to worsen, National Crime Agency (NCA) child abuse lead Rob Jones warned, if social media sites such as Facebook press ahead with further encryption of messaging services.

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TikTok to tackle grooming with safeguards for young users

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NSPCC welcomes changes as it says abusers are taking advantage of pandemic to target children online

Children on TikTok will face “groundbreaking” new restrictions in an attempt to prevent grooming on the platform, the video-sharing company has announced, with particularly strict new rules for users under 16.

The platform, which has a lower age limit of 13, said users under 16 would no longer be able to receive comments from strangers, have their videos used for “duets” or mark their posts as available to be downloaded.

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Trolls and social media platforms face huge fines in Australia for failing to remove abuse material

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Proposed legislation would also give government power to unmask identities of anonymous accounts

Australian internet service providers, social media companies and other online platforms will need to remove severely harmful, abusive or bullying content within 24 hours or risk being blocked and fined $555,000 under the federal government’s proposed online safety legislation.

Currently, takedown notices for image-based abuse, cyber-abuse, cyberbullying, and seriously harmful online content needs to be actioned within 48 hours.

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Online incest porn is ‘normalising child abuse’, say charities

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Experts voice concern over growth of ‘deviant’ videos, including foster-child abuse fantasies, on Pornhub and other mainstream sites

Groups working on the frontline in the fight against child abuse in the UK have warned that an increase in abuse-themed pornography is “normalising” child abuse.

Children’s charity Barnado’s said it is working with vulnerable children who are being put at risk by “deviant” pornography that fetishises fantasies of sex with children.

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‘These images are a crime scene … it’s massive for us to find the child’

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The Internet Watch Foundation is seeing a growing number of tipoffs about child abuse. We talk to one analyst about her work

Isobel* has been working throughout lockdown. With her colleagues in the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) analyst room in Cambridge she has been responding to a rising number of tipoffs from the public that child abuse images are circulating online. The work is gruelling.

“Today I started at 8.30 and I’ll be looking at content all day long: thousands and thousands of images in a day. We analysts come from all sorts of backgrounds. The main thing is your emotional resilience – it’s incredibly important that you can look at this content and then go home and not think about it.”

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‘Deeply dark criminal activity’ drives rise in child abuse images online

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The use of webcams and live streaming has led to increased grooming by predators during the coronavirus pandemic

Child abuse experts are warning that an growing trend of children being groomed through webcams and live streaming by predators has led to a sharp rise in the number of abusive images circulating online since the beginning of the pandemic.

Much of this abuse is happening in children’s own homes while their parents or caregivers are in another room, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which says it had already dealt with an increased number of reports of online child abuse images this year. September was a record month with 15,000 reports from the public, 5,000 more than the same month in 2019.

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Kenya calls for help in fight against rising sexual abuse by foreigners

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Anti-trafficking organisations say widespread trust in white outsiders makes children an easy target for abusers from the west

Child protection organisations in Kenya say more needs to be done to protect young people from exploitation by overseas perpetrators, as the country reports a rising number of abuse cases.

The warning follows the arrest of Gregory Dow, a 61-year-old missionary, who last month pleaded guilty in a US court to sexually abusing girls at an orphanage he ran in Kenya.

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List of world’s worst ‘digital predators’ stretches from India and Brazil to US

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Freedom of expression group names and shames alleged offenders on online censorship and orchestrated repression

A freedom of expression group has launched a list of “digital predators”, ranking what it says are 20 of the world’s worst offenders for cyber-censorship and orchestrated online repression.

Published on Thursday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to coincide with World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, the list names and shames entities around the globe whose activities it regards as “tantamount to preying on journalism”.

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Australian paedophiles pay as little as $15 for online abuse of children in Philippines

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Australian federal police say livestreaming of children performing sexual acts marks ‘alarming shift’


Australian paedophiles are paying as little as A$15 for children to perform sexual acts online while being filmed in the Philippines, according to the head of the Australian federal police team in Manila.

Senior officer Andrew Perkins told Guardian Australia there was an “alarming shift” from previously more common types of “sex tourism” to “convenient and low-risk” online abuse of children which can be customised to the specific requirements of customers.

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African countries a ‘new frontier for child sexual exploitation’, warns report

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Researchers draw link between weak regulation of travel industry and rising levels of sex tourism and online sexual crime

Weak laws regulating sexual exploitation in travel and tourism are turning the African continent into a “new frontier for child sexual exploitation”, according to a new report.

The study, by the African Child Policy Forum, sheds light on the continued rise of child sexual exploitation, including new forms such as “tourism marriages” and cybersex.

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Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web

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Inventor of web calls on governments and firms to safeguard it from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global action plan to save the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other malign forces that threaten to plunge the world into a “digital dystopia”.

The Contract for the Web requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity.

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A 12-year-old girl, online sexual exploitation and lax financial rules

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The Westpac scandal has brought the role of financial institutions in enabling child sexual abuse into sharp relief

On 25 October plainclothes police barged through the red door of a family home in a dense neighbourhood in Rizal, a province two hours away from Manila.

There they arrested a mother who was allegedly sexually exploiting her own 12-year-old daughter. The 45-year-old woman was clutching her phone. Police took it and then handcuffed her.

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Instagram’s anti-bullying AI asks users: ‘Are you sure you want to post this?’

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Instagram said early tests found it encourages users to ‘share something less hurtful once they have had a chance to reflect’

Instagram is inviting users to think again before posting unkind comments with a new tool designed to curb bullying on the social media platform.

The company is rolling out a new feature that uses AI to identify negative comments before they are published and asks “are you sure you want to post this?” before it is shared on another person’s post.

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Sexism, slander, hatred: Sri Lanka’s culture of online abuse

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From politicians to members of the LGBTQI community, social media in Sri Lanka is a hotbed of harassment and hostility

The threats began after Jegatheeswaram Jeyachandrika decided to contest local government elections.

Clutching a file of printouts, Meena, as she is known, points to a Facebook post in which she is pictured, circled in red, among a group of people.

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Here, here: the Swedish online love army who take on the trolls

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#Jagärhär (#Iamhere) aims to battle abuse in online threads and jumps to defend those on receiving end

When a young woman with rainbow hair and a reputation for hostility towards sexual predators won a Swedish lawyer of the year award late last year, the online reaction came in two waves.

The first was unpleasant, a torrent of bile from people who objected to Linnéa Claeson’s looks, her feminist politics, her gender, her youth and her instagram account @assholesonline.

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