I wish my job didn’t exist – the team that has to find child abuse images

At home she is a loving grandmother who enjoys spending time with her grandkids but at work Mabel has to watch the internet’s most “abhorrent” child sex abuse.

She works for one of the few organisations licensed to actively search the internet for indecent content to help police and tech firms take the images down.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) helped remove a record almost 300,000 web pages last year, including more artificial intelligence (AI) generated images than ever as the number of these types of images have increased almost fivefold.

“The content is horrific, it shouldn’t ever have been created in the first place,” said Mabel, a former police officer.

“You don’t ever become immune to it, because at the end of the day these are all child victims, it’s abhorrent.”

Mabel – not her real name – is exposed to some of the most depraved and horrific images online and said her family were her main motivation for carrying out her analyst role.

Mabel, originally from north Wales, calls herself a “disruptor” and said she likes obstructing criminal gangs who share abuse footage and images to make money.

The foundation’s analysts are given anonymity so they feel safe and secure from those who object to their work, such as criminal gangs.

“There’s not many jobs where you go to work in the morning and do good all day, and also irritate really bad people, so I get the best of both worlds,” said Mabel.

“When I remove an image, I’m physically stopping the bad people accessing those images.

“I have children and grandchildren and I just want to make the internet a safer place for them.

“On a wider scale, we collaborate with law enforcement agencies all around the world so they can form an investigation and maybe put gangs to bay.”

The IWF, based in Cambridge, is one of only three organisations in the world licensed to actively search for child abuse content online and last year helped take down 291,270 web pages which can contain thousands of image and videos.

The foundation also said it helped take down almost five times more AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery this year than last, rising to 245 compared to 51 in 2023.

The UK government last month announced four new laws to tackle images made with AI.

The content is not easy for Tamsin McNally and her 30-strong team to see but she knows their work helps protect children.

“We make a difference and that’s why I do it,” the team leader said.

“On Monday morning I walked into the hotline and we had over 2,000 reports from members of the public stating that they had stumbled across this kind of imagery. We get hundreds of reports every single day.

“I really hope everyone sees this is a problem and everybody does their bit to stop it happening in the first place.

“I wish my job didn’t exist but as long as there are spaces online there will be the need for jobs like mine, sadly.

“When I tell people what I do quite often people can’t believe this job exists in the first place. Then secondly they say, why would you want to do that?”

Analysts at the charity have mandatory monthly counselling, weekly team meetings and regular wellbeing support.

“There’s those formal things, but also informally – we’ve got a pool table, a huge connect four, jigsaw corner – I’m an avid jigsaw fan, where we can take a break if needed,” added Mabel.

“All these things combined help to keep us all here.”

The IWF has strict guidelines making sure personal phones are not allowed in the office or that any work, including emails, are not taken out.

Despite applying to work there, Manon – again, not her real name – was not sure if it was a job she could do.

“I don’t even like watching horror films, so I was completely unsure whether I’d be able to do the job,” said Manon, who is in her early twenties and from south Wales.

“But the support that you get is so intense and wide-ranging, it’s reassuring.

“Every way you look at it, you’re making the internet a better place and I don’t think there are many jobs where you can do that every single day.”

She studied linguistics at university, which included work around online language and grooming, and that piqued her interest in the work of the foundation.

“Offenders can be described as their own community – and as part of that they have their own language or code that they use to hide in plain sight,” said Manon.

“Being able to apply what I learnt at university to then put that into a real world scenario and be able to find child sexual abuse images and disrupt that community is really satisfying.”