This Paper, carried out by Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in partnership with Microsoft, introduces the key findings of a quantitative study of youth-produced sexual content online.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”. During the course of the Study, 3,803 images and videos were assessed as meeting the research criteria.
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.
What emerged from the data in this Study is an increasing trend for the distribution of sexually explicit content produced by younger children using laptop webcams which, due to the nature of the technology used, they are aware is being shared with at least one other party.