Child seen in sex abuse videos identified after researcher spots school badge

A girl who appeared in hundreds of child sexual abuse images and videos has been tracked down after years of searching by internet safety experts.

The victim, who is now a young adult, was finally identified and contacted after researchers saw a picture of her school uniform.

Investigators from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) first saw the girl in child sexual abuse material in 2020, but back then had no way to find her.

The analyst who identified the girl said it was "a huge uplift" that she was able to find the young woman - which is rare for safety researchers working in this field.

The child, who was around 13 years old, was groomed over video calls and text chats into creating content of herself - some of it in the most extreme category for this kind of abuse.

The IWF uses reports from the public and its own searching to find and remove child sexual abuse material from the internet.

Although analysts are not tasked with finding victims, occasionally they issue reports to police if there are strong enough clues in the material they see.

But successfully identifying abused children from this kind of content is rare.

The IWF analyst, who wants to be known as Mabel, said in this case the girl's face came up so many times over the years that she "just stuck in my head".

In January a new batch of suspected illegal images was sent to Mabel for analysis.

It turned out these were not illegal in nature, so normally this would mean analysts move on to the next case.

But Mabel instantly recognised the schoolgirl and started to look for clues about who she could be.

"I started clicking on all the images. And in this folder, they were all photographs of her in a school uniform, in a school gym, in the canteen, in her gym uniform, in her blazer," Mabel said.

She zoomed in on the school blazer and began trying to locate the school through its emblem.

Once she did, she went to the police, who contacted the school.

Some of the files also included a girl's name that helped further narrow down the search.

Police managed to find the victim - now a young adult - who had never reported the grooming or abuse.

"It was wonderful to hear she is now being given help," Mabel said.

Police told Mabel that the young woman also expressed gratitude and relief that work was continuing to find and take down images and videos of her.

"It's a really lovely outcome to something we had been seeing for years and years and years," Mabel said.

Identifying victims in this way is extremely difficult and is made even harder with the introduction of AI-generated content of children who do not exist.

On Tuesday, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) revealed that almost 37,000 child sexual abuse image crimes were logged by police forces across the UK last year.

The charity is calling on tech companies to increase safeguards that block nude images from being taken and shared on children's devices.