How you can report cases of child abuse online and in the UAE

The ‘Report it, don’t share it’ campaign, is informed by research conducted earlier this year by Meta and the world’s leading experts on child exploitation, including the US non-profit organisation, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and UK-based Professor Ethel Quayle, a leading clinical psychologist who specialises in sex offenders.
To date, much of the research on why people engage with child sexual abuse materials has involved evaluations of people’s psychological makeup. However, Meta’s research looks at behavioural signals from a fixed point in time and from a snapshot of users’ life on Meta’s platforms.
Researchers evaluated 150 accounts that Meta reported to NCMEC for uploading child exploitation content between July and August of 2020 and January 2021, and found that more than 75 per cent did not exhibit malicious intent, that is, they did not intend to harm a child. Instead, these accounts appeared to share the content for other reasons, such as outrage or inappropriate humour.
The study also found that the majority of reports Meta sent to NCMEC were for the same or visually similar content. Ninety per cent of the images or videos of child sexual abuse analysed in the study were found to be copies, rather than unique or new content.
In addition, just six pieces of visually distinct media were responsible for more than half of all child-exploitative content that the company reported to NCMEC in the same period.
Based on this analysis, the company developed the campaign together with child safety partners to help reduce instances of child exploitation content being shared on Meta platforms.
“While this data indicates that the number of pieces of content does not equal the number of victims, one victim is one too many. Preventing and eradicating online child sexual exploitation and abuse requires a cross-industry approach, and Meta is committed to doing our part to protect children on and off our apps. We are taking a research-informed approach to develop effective solutions that disrupt the sharing of child exploitation material,” David Miles, Meta Head of Safety Policy, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said.
“No matter the reason, sharing images or videos of child sexual abuse online has a devastating impact on the child depicted in that content. We are working with Meta to get a better understanding of how we can effectively disrupt sharing and prevent re-victimising children, and educate people on what they can do to report this crime,” Abdulrahman Altamimi, Director of the Child Protection Centre at the UAE’s Ministry of Interior, said.