Labour urged to block child abuse material on all British devices

Labour must block child sexual abuse material on all British smart devices, a group of politicians and campaigners have declared.

A white paper launched on Wednesday will argue that device-level protections, similar to those that the Government has committed to for blocking images of nudity, can be adapted to prevent child sexual abuse material from being viewed on smartphones, laptops and tablets.

Jess Phillips, former Labour Violence Against Women Minister, and Lord Nash, a Tory former Education Minister, will host a parliamentary briefing alongside survivors of online child sexual abuse.

The white paper by the International Justice Mission (IJM) will be published as polling showed 80 per cent of people support technology blocking abuse being installed on their devices, with five per cent opposed.

Research by the Internet Watch Foundation found 73 per cent of the child sexual abuse material analysed in 2025 was not self-generated and likely captured on adult devices.

The scale of the trade in child abuse material had become a global criminal industry, it said, with Britain one of its biggest markets.

Ms Phillips said that children in the UK and across the world were being sexually abused daily, with the images "traded and watched for years afterwards".

She added: "Nowhere is that clearer than in the Philippines, where one child in every 100 has been trafficked to be abused live on camera to order, and where buyers in Britain are among the biggest customers in the world.

"This should be a source of national shame, and we must stop it.

"The technology, the evidence and the public support are all there; I want to work with ministers to extend on-device blocking to child sexual abuse material on every device sold in Britain, making children here and over the world safer."

The supply of child abuse material is now described as "limitless" as the rate of AI-generated images has surged.

Britain's child abuse image database held fewer than 10,000 images in the late 1990s, compared to 40 million today.

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Lord Nash said Britain faced an online child sex abuse "crisis", adding that material was no longer hidden on the dark web but "on the apps that we all use every day".

"By the time the police are involved, a child has already been abused and the images and videos have gone round the globe," he added.

"The material has to be blocked on the phone itself, before the harm is done."

In June, Sir Keir Starmer, as Prime Minister, called on tech companies to implement device-level controls to block children from sending and receiving nude images.

But in September, Lisa Nandy told MPs that despite "significant commitments" from Apple and Google, current proposals did not "meet the scale of this crisis".

Online rights groups have previously warned that implementing the legislation would result in every adult being forced through a "digital ID checkpoint", with private images scanned by default.

A Government spokesman said: "We are putting in place the strongest online safety laws in the world.

"This includes preparing world-first legislation to call on the biggest technology companies to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images.

"We will also give the police the powers they need to keep pace with criminal use of emerging technologies in order to keep our children safe."