Internet Watch Foundation

Answer: Section 45 of the Sex Offences Act 2003 amended S.1. Protection of Children Act (POCA) 1978 in May 2004 by raising the age of a ‘child’ from 16 to 18.

 

The ammended Section 1 POCA 1978 now makes it an offence to; take, make, allow to take, distribute, show, possess with intent to distribute, or advertise indecent photos or pseudo-photographs of children under the age of 18.

That means, by knowingly looking at an indecent image of a child you are breaking the law in this country. Making or downloading potentially illegal child sexual abuse images is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

 

Within this amendment to the POC Act there are circumstances where a photograph of a person over the age of 16, but under the age of 18 would not be an offence: For full details of this please see Sexual Offences Act 2003, sections 16-19. 

Answer: It means any images of children, apparently under 18 years old, involved in sexual activity or posed to be sexually provocative and include images depicting erotic posing, with no sexual activity.

 

Answer: There is a potential for abuse of any image placed on the internet. This could be by cutting & pasting images, editing images or changing the context within which the images are viewed. Changing images digitally in this way is sometimes called ‘morphing’.

 

For more information see Child Protection in Sport Unit and Becta's guidelines on using images and video safely on school websites.

 

For information on the use of images of children by schools for their own publicity purposes see Teachernet.

 

If you discover an inappropriate image of a child being used on a web-site, make a full report of the web-site to the IWF at www.iwf.org.uk on our simple and easy to use report form.