Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) on Thursday said that its India Reporting Portal has received 1,000 reports related to online child pornography.
Launched in India 2016, the online reporting portal allows users to anonymously report objectionable content to highly trained IWF analysts so that this material can be fully assessed and removed from the internet. The portal is available in both English and Hindi, and can be accessed here: http://aarambhindia.org/report
A report can be made completely anonymously, and it only takes a few seconds. It is then assessed by an expert analyst from the IWF Hotline team, based in the UK. If the image or video is illegal, the analyst will use a global network of partners to take down the content.
In 2017, an anonymous report was made through the Indian Portal to IWF. The report showed child pornography hosted in a cyberlocker. The material was extremely disturbing, showing baby girls and boys from a range of ethnicities. Although an internet user in India made the report, the webpage was hosted in Russia and contained over 200 videos. The time between the report being sent from India, to the time it was notified to the Russian Hotline was 1 hour 7 minutes.
Susie Hargreaves OBE, IWF CEO, said in a press release, “I’m incredibly proud that the India Reporting Portal has been so successfully established and that Indian web users have taken the message about reporting these horrific images and videos to heart. It’s a tough job to start from scratch and raise awareness, so people know where to report this imagery safely and anonymously, if they stumble across it. But our 1000th report shows that this important message is getting through."
IWF has partnered with Aarambh India, a NGO, for this project..