Reports & Summaries

This Paper introduces the key findings of a quantitative study of youth-produced sexual content online (“the Study”). The Study took place over a three month period between September and November 2014 and used a combination of proactively sourced content from search engines, historic IWF data and leads from public reports to locate “youth-produced sexual content” depicting “young people”. Where the content was assessed as meeting these criteria the content was analysed in accordance with IWF’s standard procedures for actioning child sexual abuse content, capturing data about each image/video including image category, site type, commerciality, hosting location, device used to create the content and the assessed age and gender of the individuals depicted. The key findings of the Study were as follows:  17.5% of content depicted children aged 15 years or younger.  85.9% of content depicting children aged 15 or younger was created using a webcam.  93.1% of the content depicting children aged 15 or younger featured girls.  46.9% of content depicting children aged 15 years or younger was Category A or B5 compared to 27.6% of content in the 16-20 years age range.  89.9% of the total images and videos assessed as part of the Study had been harvested from the original upload location and were being redistributed on third party websites.