The Internet Watch Foundation highlights key online harms in 2025 report
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has published two important reports that show the scale of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. In these reports they share the key emerging and persistent harms for child and young people and highlight the need for a global response to a global issue.
What are some emerging and persistent harms for young people that you need to be aware of?
Their 2025 Annual Report identified four key areas of concern: sexually coerced extortion (sextortion), violence against women and girls, victimization of older teens and AI-generated CSAM.
Here are some of the key statistics from the report:
- In 2025, IWF analysts assessed 451,250 reports and 311,610 of those were confirmed to contain CSAM.
- That’s equivalent to one report assessed every 70 seconds and one confirmed case of CSAM every 101 seconds.
- The number of AI-generated videos containing CSAM increased 260-fold from 2024 to 3,443 videos.
- 65% of AI-generated images and videos contained category A material (the most severe/extreme category content).
- Boys are disproportionately reporting sextortion with 92% of reports from this group.
- Reports of sextortion were also highest amongst 14–17-year-olds.
- 77% of CSAM victims are girls, and this jumps up to 97% of AI-generated CSAM victims. But only 28% of criminal reports through the Report Remove service are submitted by girls.
- Since 2022 reports from 14-17-year-olds made on the Report Remove tool have increased 13-fold.
- 33% of images of 14-17-year-old children were ‘self-generated’.
Read the full summary of the report and insights from the launch event
AI-generated CSAM has had such a worrying advancement since 2023, that the IWF also published a report into the scale of AI-generated abuse. They have made it very clear that while the content may be artificial, the harms it is causing are very real. While the amount of material is small in scale (compared to the amount of material the IWF acts on each year), it does not minimize harm. It’s also important to note that generative models are being trained and fine-tuned using abusive images which re-victimises survivors.
Discover the key statistics of AI-generated CSAM
What can you do?
If you are an educator or parent/carer, understanding the work of the IWF and how they can support children and young people is the first step. Signposting support and helping children and young people feel confident in reporting and raising concerns is the next, more difficult step.
For educators, we hope that our guide ‘Helping your students when things go wrong online’ will be a really useful tool. It contains information around reporting on different platforms, how to break down barriers for young people and overcome stigma around reporting and has inside lesson plans and resources too. Some of these would also be great to share with other members of your school community such as parents, carers and governors.
You can sign up to download your free copy here.
Working together to create safer tech
If you work at a tech company, safety by design is paramount in helping keep children and young people safe online. Look at where the potential risks are with your platform and reach out to organizations like the IWF for support with how you can mitigate those. You could also consider becoming one of their members, just like we have at classroom.cloud powered by NetSupport. To really safeguard young people collaboration and joint action is essential.