The Study was carried out by Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in partnership with Microsoft and was initially designed to expand upon an earlier study carried out by IWF in 2012 which provided a snapshot of the availability of self-generated sexual content featuring young people online and the extent to which control over that content is lost once it has appeared online.

During the course of the Study, 3,803 images and videos were assessed as meeting the research criteria.

The key findings of the Study were as follows:

• 17.5% of content depicted children aged 15 years or younger.
• 85.9% of content depicting children aged 15 or younger was created using a webcam.
• 93.1% of the content depicting children aged 15 or younger featured girls.
• 46.9% of content depicting children aged 15 years or younger was Category A or B5 compared to 27.6% of content in the 16-20 years age range.
• 89.9% of the total images and videos assessed as part of the Study had been harvested from the original upload location and were being redistributed on third party websites.

What emerged from the data in this Study is an increasing trend for the distribution of sexually explicit content produced by younger children using laptop webcams which, due to the nature of the technology used, they are aware is being shared with at least one other party. To reflect this finding, we instead propose a new definition of “youth-produced sexual content” as: “Nude or semi-nude images or videos produced by a young person of themselves engaging in erotic or sexual activity and intentionally shared by any electronic means.”