Internet Watch Foundation

The IWF is a not for profit organisation dedicated to minimising the availability of UK internet content that is

• racially abusive or
• criminally obscene or
• contains images of child sexual abuse anywhere in the world.

Their website is somewhere people can go to report such content found on the internet. Since the beginning of the year their hotline has dealt with an average of 866 reports a week!

The number of commercial sites being reported has dropped slightly from 70% to 68% of all sites but it is still a high number. It is physically sickening to think that people like to make money out of this material and that people are willing to pay.

Unfortunately it is a constant battle because what tends to happen is that once a site has been closed down it just moves to a server in another country such as Russia where there is less scrutiny.

Interestingly in the UK in 2008 there have been few sites reported as being dedicated to racial hatred. However there were 77 reports referring to criminally obscene content, 51 or which were sites hosted on one server which has since been dealt with. These 51 sites I understand have just moved overseas.

Until the whole world has a consistent approach to the handling of this problem it is always going to be a problem.