The Internet Watch Foundation is made up of a team of over 70 diverse people working in a variety of disciplines including our front-line analysts and image classification assessors who spend each and every working day assessing images and videos of children suffering sexual abuse. The team are led by our Senior Leadership Team under the executive management of Susie Hargreaves OBE, our CEO.
Our strategy and long-term objectives are overseen by our Board of Trustees. They're a group of professionally and personally diverse individuals who are leaders in their own right, bringing varied and relevant experiences to the IWF. We are accountable to the Charities Commission and Companies House and submit the requisite documents to them as required. Our staff are supported by comprehensive and wide-ranging welfare structures and are subject to enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service checks (formerly called Criminal Records Bureau checks) before their appointment.
We are an independent, non-profit charitable organisation working in partnership with a range of other organisations from the private, public and NGO sectors.
We were set up in 1996 by the internet industry to provide an internet Hotline for the public and IT professionals to report potentially criminal online content within our remit and to be the 'notice and takedown' body for this content. Our Code of Practice details our role in these takedown procedures. Once informed, the host or internet service provider (ISP) is duty-bound under the E-Commerce Regulations (Liability of intermediary service providers) to quickly remove or disable access to the criminal content. See more on our history here.
We work in partnership with the internet and tech industries, global law enforcement, governments, the education sector, charities and non-profits across the world and the public to minimise, disrupt and stop the availability of child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world, and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK.
We are funded by the generosity of private donors and our Member companies from the online and tech industries, including internet service providers (ISPs), mobile operators, content providers, hosting providers, filtering companies, search providers, educational establishments, trade associations and the financial sector. We work together to ensure their networks are a hostile environment for hosting known child sexual abuse images and videos and to protect internet users from accidental exposure to this content.
We are recognised as a national and international model of partnership working and are committed to sharing good practice with relevant agencies, authorities and governments around the world.