Over a Million Brit Adults Have Inadvertently Stumbled Across Child Porn

An internet watchdog has revealed that more than 1.5 million adults have stumbled across child porn while browsing content online. A survey by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), set up in 1996 as a UK hotline to report criminal content online, discovered that 4% of men and 2% of women have come into contact with images of child abuse, the Daily Star reports.

The survey also showed around 40% of Britons would not know how to report child porn if they were to encounter it, the paper said.

Child porn emerged as the number one concern among adults when considering a range of illegal or harmful content online, with terrorist websites and extreme or violent pornography coming closely behind, the paper added.

IWF chief executive Susie Hargreaves said there is clear public concern over the availability of images and videos of children being sexually abused on the internet, adding what is concerning for them is that not enough people know how to report this or would rather ignore it, especially considering the survey tells us that around 1.5 million British adults have seen this sort of content online.

Hargreaves added although they have seen record removal times in the UK, during 2012 they saw a higher proportion of images of children under 10 years old being sexually abused.

Around 77% of those surveyed were most concerned by child porn, while 73% were worried about terrorist websites and 68% were concerned by extreme and violent porn, the paper reported.

In the whole of 2012, the IWF logged just 73 UK websites hosting child sexual abuse images or videos, compared with 9,477 hosted in other countries around the world, the paper concluded. (ANI)

Source-ANI