The amount of material in the most severe category of online child sexual abuse has doubled in two years, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has warned.

The charity said that the rise in more extreme material is in part due to criminal sites looking to commercialise the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Data from the charity revealed that last year a record-breaking 51,369 of the webpages it took action to remove or block from the internet contained ‘Category A’ child sexual abuse, up from 25,050 pages in 2020.

The number of webpages commercialising the sexual abuse of children more than doubled from 12,900 pages three years ago, to 28,933 last year.

Susie Hargreaves OBE, chief executive of the IWF, said: “We have seen criminals looking to exploit more and more insidious ways to profit from the abuse of children. “I don’t think I can overstate the harm being done here. These are real children, and the suffering inflicted on them is unimaginable. They are being raped, and subjected to sexual torture, and criminals are making money off the back of that. It is truly appalling."

Category A material now accounts for a fifth of all the content the IWF sees, up from 18 per cent in 2021, and 17 per cent the year before.

"Child sexual abuse is an abhorrent crime. It is paramount that the perpetrators of this abuse are identified and brought to justice," said minister for security Tom Tugendhat.

He continued: "Most importantly, companies need to ensure that features such as end-to-end encryption have the necessary safety features built in so that they do not blind themselves to abuse occurring on their platforms.”

The security minister's comments come after WhatsApp published an open letter warning that the UK government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill could lead to tech firms being forced to "break end-to-end encryption" on private messaging apps.

The letter, co-signed by executives at WhatsApp, Signal, Element, Wire, Viber, Threema, and OPTF/Session, hits back at the upcoming Online Safety Bill, claiming the law could lead to “indiscriminate surveillance” of personal messages friends, employees, executives, journalists, human rights activists, and politicians.

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