Today, Argentina has launched the country’s first portal for identifying, reporting and removing child sexual abuse material. Launched by the Internet Watch Foundation, this portal is the 30th to be funded by the End Violence Partnership since our collaboration began in 2017.

“With the launch of Argentina’s new Internet Watch Foundation portal, people across the country can detect and report online sexual images and videos of children, and contribute to the removal of this content across the world,” said Dr Howard Taylor, the Executive Director of the End Violence Partnership. “We congratulate Argentina for this ground-breaking effort to keep children safe online.”

Developed in partnership with the Ministerio Publico Fiscal – Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires and the International Center for Missing and Exploitation Children (ICMEC), the portal is accessible in Spanish at this link. Once flagged through the new portal, images and videos will be assessed by trained analysts from the IWF in the United Kingdom, and if they are found to contain child sexual abuse, they will be blocked and removed from the internet.

In 2020 alone, portals like these helped the Internet Watch Foundation assess a webpage every two minutes. Every three minutes, they found a webpage that showed a child being sexually abused. Portals like this can make the world of a difference for children, particularly in the context of COVID-19 – which led children to spend more time online than ever before.

This portal is the fifth portal to be launched through funding from the End Violence Partnership in 2021 alone. Over the past six months, portals have also been launched in Guatemala, Kenya, Morocco and Tunisia. IWF Portals are available in 17 languages, including Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Kazakh, Lingala, Malaysian Bahasa, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Wolof.

“This launch marks the end of the Portal Project funded by the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children,” said Susie Hargreaves, OBE, Chief Executive of the Internet Watch Foundation. “Thanks to them, we are launching the 30th and last portal today, fully funded by the Partnership. We are so grateful for their support throughout these past years, and we hope to continue our collaboration in the years to come.”

Learn more about our work to keep children Safe Online.

Photo: UNICEF/UN0429134/Djemidzic