‘Zara’ spends hours tracking down the creators of child sex abuse images

Note: This story contains descriptions of child exploitation and abuse that some readers may find disturbing. Zara’s name has been changed to protect her identity.

When Zara leaves her work every day, she likes to imagine she is exiting through an airlock. After she passes through the two sets of double doors to leave the office, whatever she has seen that day is confined to the room behind her, unable to reach her as she returns home. 

“Perhaps images of babies might stick in my mind a little bit more,” she says. “But we’re trained to not take those images home with you. There are techniques that my counsellor has given me that if an image did stick around, I’ve got some tools on how to remove it from my mind.”

Zara is a senior analyst at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) – a non-profit charitable organisation whose mission is to “detect, disrupt, remove and prevent online child sexual abuse material (CSAM)”.

The IWF runs a hotline where members of the public can anonymously report any images they may have stumbled across on the internet for Zara and her team of 15 fellow analysts to review and investigate. The hotline currently gets between three and four hundred new tips a day.

“If we find child sex abuse material, we’ll trace where that material is, so we find where it’s hosted,” Zara explains. “We’ll then send a notice of takedown to the ISP of where that content is hosted. If it’s in the UK, we’re very proud that we are a very hostile country to hosting this kind of content […] if necessary, we’ll use our partners in law enforcement to get that content removed.”

Zara began her career moderating the chats on platforms like LEGO Worlds and Wii U, making sure children were not sharing personal information online. She was aware of the IWF’s work, and was eager to apply when they began employing analysts. 

“It’s a very long hiring process,” she recalls. “It takes about three interviews to make sure that you’ve got the support and the resilience to do the work.” 

As part of her job Zara is often required to analyse category A material – the most severe classification of CSAM.

“I’d never seen this sort of stuff before, so I really didn’t know what to expect,” she says. “Suddenly you’re just looking at the images as a crime scene, rather than the abuse taking place.” 

“Immediately you’re analysing it: What can I see? What’s going on in the background? Can I see an offender? I need to digitally, forensically look at this image and gather the information I need.”

It is estimated that there are over 830,000 adults in the UK who pose a sexual risk to children, and the proliferation of AI-generated CSAM is making the IWF’s work even more challenging. “It’s now incredibly difficult to distinguish between a synthetic image and a real image of child abuse,” she says. 

The IWF have noticed an even more disturbing trend arise in recent years: AI tools trained on existing images of children. “Victims of real child sex abuse are having their images used to create synthetic ones, and they are generally more violent. Can you imagine? They’re just being re-victimised again. I can’t imagine how harmful that is for them.” 

Grok, the AI chatbot on the platform X, garnered controversy last year for allowing users to create synthetic images of naked minors. X asserts that this has since been corrected and illegal material is no longer able to be created on the platform, but Zara still believes more needs to be done.

“They do have responsibility,” she says when discussing Silicon Valley AI companies. “But they’ve already built these platforms, and they weren’t thinking of child safety when they built them […] I’m hoping that the tech industry will not put their profits first and lead by safety by design.” 

The IWF hopes to create “an internet free from child sexual abuse that is a safe place for children and adults to use”. But for the meantime, Zara will have to brave re-entry into the airlock and do the work that few others would have the resilience to do. 

Featured image illustration: Emilie Lenglart