Few people know what she does for a living, for it is not the kind of work you can easily chat about over dinner or drinks. The sickening images she takes home with her are hard to comprehend, let alone stomach.
Day in, day out, Sally - a neat, well-dressed, dark-haired young woman who could pass for an executive - spends hours poring over pictures of children being abused, raped and tortured.
Sickening: Day in, day out, Sally, 33, spends hours examining child porn, looking for details that might identify abusers
It might be something as small as the titles of books on a table, the make of bedding or images on posters on the wall - anything that might provide a clue to a country, a city or the place where this young child is suffering, and might ultimately lead the police to the abuser.
'You are upset for the child and what they have had to endure,' Sally says. 'You want to look away, out of respect for the individual, but you mustn't. You have to look for clues, anything that can help.'
These films, she says, happen
anywhere and everywhere. What stands out is their ordinariness: a brown
sofa or beige carpet, a mantelpiece loaded with everyday knick-knacks.
Cheap curtains and budget upholstery.
There is nothing glamorous about where this activity takes place, though sometimes there are clues, so subtle that you need to be an expert in interior design to spot them.
'When I first started this job, yes, there was anger at the beginning. I lost my appetite for a while, along with half a stone. It's a perfectly natural reaction to what you are seeing, but you can't let that take you over.'
Sally is one of a five-strong team of
analysts - four women and a man - working for the Internet Watch
Foundation (IWF) an independent charity set up by the internet industry
17 years ago.
To date, the IWF has helped to remove more than 100,000 pages containing child sexual abuse from the web and passed vital information to the police to help them rescue victims and stop abusers.
Last year alone, it received nearly 40,000 reports about suspect pages, 80 per cent of which depicted children under the age of ten.
It's the kind of publicly available material that prompted the Mail's campaign to call for a crackdown on the ease at which it is accessed in homes. On Monday, David Cameron announced new measures to ensure internet users have to actively 'opt in' to adult content sites, with internet search engine filters automatically switched to filter them out.
Thanks to the vigilance of workers like Sally, Britain actually hosts the lowest level of child abuse material of any major nation - less than one per cent of reports now relate to content held on British-based computers.
It receives up to 170 reports a day from people who have spotted something disturbing online, which can then be blocked.
'When I first started this job there was anger at the beginning. I lost my appetite for a while, along with half a stone. It's a perfectly natural reaction, but you can't let that take you over.'
Currently, the team can't bypass pay
barriers - where child abuse images are shared between abusers on
private networks. This is because the charity is industry-based and
funded, and it still has to follow UK laws, the same as private
individuals.
That may change, as the IWF is being urged by the Government to be more pro-active in seeking out abusive content.
How, you may ask, can Sally bear to do such work? Indeed, who of us would be prepared to bear witness to the suffering of these children knowing whatever success was achieved was a mere drop in the ocean?
And all that for a salary of less than £23,000 a year.
'We need to protect children from being victimised and re-victimised, and if I can be a very small part - a cog - of that machine, I'll be satisfied. I will have helped make a difference,' says Sally, who joined IWF two years ago after working in the computer games industry as an IT technician.
'Do I get upset by my work? Of course I do: but that isn't what's important. Someone has to be there for the children.'
Sally and other members of the team agreed to speak to me at the IWF offices on condition of strict anonymity: there are many faceless abusers or those who make money from peddling vile images who would like their work to stop or exact revenge.
The day I visited the offices, Sally
was working with Ian, 29, a married IT worker who joined IWF two months
ago, and Sarah, a single woman in her 30s. She comes from a legal
background, formerly specialising in online copyright infringement.
Over the past year, Sarah has been researching the explosion of so-called 'self-generated' material appearing on websites - sexual images children and teens have posted of themselves on social media.
Worryingly, Sarah tells me there is a growing market for such images among paedophiles. There is growth, too, in images of this kind that have the hallmarks of coercion, grooming or cyber-bullying.
As the recent high-profile murders of April Jones and Tia Sharp have shown, there appears to be a clear link between the use of child pornography and sex crimes against children. 'You try and stay dispassionate,' says Sarah. 'Not to empathise too much. Once you do that you couldn't do the job any more.'
Even so, she tells of one awful moment which sticks in her mind. It was a film of a small child being abused by her father. There was, she says, 'just this one piece of dialogue. The child is heard asking: “Is this what people do, Daddy?”
'It was heartbreaking to hear, which is why I generally don't listen to soundtracks, unless I absolutely have to.
'Most of the time these crimes are committed by individuals known to the children. Friends, relatives, close family,' she says. 'So we are not just looking at physical abuse, but abuse of trust.
'When people start this work they expect to see children screaming, crying. One of the most uncomfortable things - something paedophiles claim in their defence - is that the victims may seem happy or be smiling. They don't understand yet that anything wrong is being done to them. That awareness only comes later.'
Ian, the newest member of the team, is the quietest. He, like Sally, used to work in the computer games industry. His motivation in joining the IWF, he says, was to protect the public.
He tells me his wife and family know about his work and are supportive, but he never discusses the details with them. He likes to leave that in the office.
'There are times, both Sally and Sarah acknowledge, when they've needed to walk away from their computers and wander quietly around a nearby lake to restore their equilibrium.'
Ian says he feels angry at the
perpetrators and distributors, but adds: 'I'm mostly very calm inside. I
take stuff in my stride and - so far - I haven't needed to escape.'
Understandably, the IWF is extremely cautious about who it recruits. Anyone who appears too enthusiastic about viewing the material, or crusaders or moralists with their own agenda, will be turned down.
It is a lengthy recruitment process. Skills and abilities are checked out before a candidate analyst is invited to spend a day with the IWF, where he or she is gradually introduced, level by level, to the kind of images included in a report.
Candidates are given 24 hours to go away and mull over what they have seen; to decide whether they can cope. Some never come back.
For those who do, support measures are in place. Analysts are closely supervised and offered counselling once a month, as well as group sessions, to teach coping techniques and how to let go of the job at the end of the day.
There are times, both Sally and Sarah acknowledge, when they've needed to walk away from their computers and wander quietly around a nearby lake to restore their equilibrium.
Not hard to understand when Sally tells you she has dealt with as many as 170 reports in one day.
Her first task, perhaps
surprisingly, is to decide whether the image is that of a child. There
are, she explains, a number of adult performers who look like children
and build a career on the back of that likeness. Such material may be
sick, but it is not unlawful.
Sally recognises many such actors by sight, knows their name and their work. She explains: 'There is slickness, a “professionalism” to such productions that tends to be missing from raw abuse pictures.
'One individual who appears frequently is, I guess, 28 and about five-and-a-half stone. She has a child of her own.'
She also sees images of real child sexual abuse being recycled over and over again on the internet - long after it has been stopped by police, or the child has grown up.
She knows the names of many of the victims - names she says she could never use should she ever have children of her own. Those names will always be associated in her mind with certain faces, certain terrible visions.
With older material, the victim's story is often over and done. They were rescued - or they weren't. They've done what they could to put their life back together; or they didn't. They survived; or they are dead.
'Thanks to the vigilance of workers like Sally, Britain actually hosts the lowest level of child abuse material of any major nation.'
It is when new images appear that
Sally feels she can make a difference because there is some child
somewhere who could potentially be rescued.
A short while ago, Sally found herself looking at a set of photos from an overseas website. The images were not actionable, but it was quite clear that they had been taken in a UK location.
In that case, the IWF passed them on to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the police agency responsible for dealing with child exploitation. They were able to identify the location and make use of the leads it created.
Sally and the other analysts not only have to distinguish real from fake images, but then make a judgment as to what level of abuse they fall under.
Child abuse material is graded on a five-point scale known as the Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP) scale, with level one indicating nudity or erotic posing with no sexual activity. Level five encompasses the most severe and depraved level of sexual abuse, including torture, sadism and bestiality.
Recently, Sally saw her first level five image involving a baby. She just clicked on a link and there it was: sickening, depraved.
She tries to shrug it off, calling it 'not one of those things you want to see last thing on a Friday' - but her hurt is written all over her face.
If the image is held on a UK
server, the team will make a call to the internet service provider and
usually the image is taken down within an hour.
IWF will also call the police, if it is British-based, because behind that image is a criminal who can be brought to book. If the image originates from outside the UK, then the IWF's sister organisations overseas will be informed.
Despite the upsetting nature of their work, Sally, Sarah and Ian seem driven and each have developed their own coping strategies to deal with the horrors they witness daily.
For Sarah, who lives alone with tropical fish and a guinea pig, the long commute home to Bedford helps her return to blessed banality.
Sally, who lives in a rented flat with her boyfriend, goes to the gym after work to unwind or goes supermarket shopping; anything to put some sort of mindless activity in place as a buffer between work and home.
She says: 'Sometimes, if I've had a tough day, I'll send my partner an email to say “Can we have a sofa night?” which means staying in watching sci-fi movies. That will always take it away.
'I'm very lucky to have a boyfriend who is communicative and passionate about his own job. He is very proud of what I do and I'm proud of him.'
The nature of her work, she says, has changed her for the better.
'My perspective of what matters has changed. I'm a lot more focused on the positive, much more relaxed about the world. I enjoy the good people around me,' she says.
As I leave, Sally tells me that her job is a bit like giving blood. She doesn't like doing it, but someone has to. She trusted herself to do it; she wasn't so sure about anyone else. She wants to make a difference.
For more details on ways to help, visit iwf.org.uk. Do NOT go looking for this material. Downloading such images, regardless of motive, is a criminal offence.
dailymail.co.uk
There is nothing glamorous about where this activity takes place, though sometimes there are clues, so subtle that you need to be an expert in interior design to spot them.
'When I first started this job, yes, there was anger at the beginning. I lost my appetite for a while, along with half a stone. It's a perfectly natural reaction to what you are seeing, but you can't let that take you over.'
Victims: April Jones (left) and Tia Sharp were killed by men who viewed paedophile porn
To date, the IWF has helped to remove more than 100,000 pages containing child sexual abuse from the web and passed vital information to the police to help them rescue victims and stop abusers.
Last year alone, it received nearly 40,000 reports about suspect pages, 80 per cent of which depicted children under the age of ten.
It's the kind of publicly available material that prompted the Mail's campaign to call for a crackdown on the ease at which it is accessed in homes. On Monday, David Cameron announced new measures to ensure internet users have to actively 'opt in' to adult content sites, with internet search engine filters automatically switched to filter them out.
Thanks to the vigilance of workers like Sally, Britain actually hosts the lowest level of child abuse material of any major nation - less than one per cent of reports now relate to content held on British-based computers.
It receives up to 170 reports a day from people who have spotted something disturbing online, which can then be blocked.
'When I first started this job there was anger at the beginning. I lost my appetite for a while, along with half a stone. It's a perfectly natural reaction, but you can't let that take you over.'
That may change, as the IWF is being urged by the Government to be more pro-active in seeking out abusive content.
How, you may ask, can Sally bear to do such work? Indeed, who of us would be prepared to bear witness to the suffering of these children knowing whatever success was achieved was a mere drop in the ocean?
And all that for a salary of less than £23,000 a year.
'We need to protect children from being victimised and re-victimised, and if I can be a very small part - a cog - of that machine, I'll be satisfied. I will have helped make a difference,' says Sally, who joined IWF two years ago after working in the computer games industry as an IT technician.
'Do I get upset by my work? Of course I do: but that isn't what's important. Someone has to be there for the children.'
Sally and other members of the team agreed to speak to me at the IWF offices on condition of strict anonymity: there are many faceless abusers or those who make money from peddling vile images who would like their work to stop or exact revenge.
Clear link: The murders of April Jones and Tia
Sharp seem to confirm a correlation between the use of child pornography
and sex crimes against children
Over the past year, Sarah has been researching the explosion of so-called 'self-generated' material appearing on websites - sexual images children and teens have posted of themselves on social media.
Worryingly, Sarah tells me there is a growing market for such images among paedophiles. There is growth, too, in images of this kind that have the hallmarks of coercion, grooming or cyber-bullying.
As the recent high-profile murders of April Jones and Tia Sharp have shown, there appears to be a clear link between the use of child pornography and sex crimes against children. 'You try and stay dispassionate,' says Sarah. 'Not to empathise too much. Once you do that you couldn't do the job any more.'
Even so, she tells of one awful moment which sticks in her mind. It was a film of a small child being abused by her father. There was, she says, 'just this one piece of dialogue. The child is heard asking: “Is this what people do, Daddy?”
'It was heartbreaking to hear, which is why I generally don't listen to soundtracks, unless I absolutely have to.
'Most of the time these crimes are committed by individuals known to the children. Friends, relatives, close family,' she says. 'So we are not just looking at physical abuse, but abuse of trust.
'When people start this work they expect to see children screaming, crying. One of the most uncomfortable things - something paedophiles claim in their defence - is that the victims may seem happy or be smiling. They don't understand yet that anything wrong is being done to them. That awareness only comes later.'
Ian, the newest member of the team, is the quietest. He, like Sally, used to work in the computer games industry. His motivation in joining the IWF, he says, was to protect the public.
He tells me his wife and family know about his work and are supportive, but he never discusses the details with them. He likes to leave that in the office.
'There are times, both Sally and Sarah acknowledge, when they've needed to walk away from their computers and wander quietly around a nearby lake to restore their equilibrium.'
Understandably, the IWF is extremely cautious about who it recruits. Anyone who appears too enthusiastic about viewing the material, or crusaders or moralists with their own agenda, will be turned down.
It is a lengthy recruitment process. Skills and abilities are checked out before a candidate analyst is invited to spend a day with the IWF, where he or she is gradually introduced, level by level, to the kind of images included in a report.
Candidates are given 24 hours to go away and mull over what they have seen; to decide whether they can cope. Some never come back.
For those who do, support measures are in place. Analysts are closely supervised and offered counselling once a month, as well as group sessions, to teach coping techniques and how to let go of the job at the end of the day.
There are times, both Sally and Sarah acknowledge, when they've needed to walk away from their computers and wander quietly around a nearby lake to restore their equilibrium.
Not hard to understand when Sally tells you she has dealt with as many as 170 reports in one day.
Worrying: There has been an explosion of sexual images children and teens have posted of themselves on social media
Sally recognises many such actors by sight, knows their name and their work. She explains: 'There is slickness, a “professionalism” to such productions that tends to be missing from raw abuse pictures.
'One individual who appears frequently is, I guess, 28 and about five-and-a-half stone. She has a child of her own.'
She also sees images of real child sexual abuse being recycled over and over again on the internet - long after it has been stopped by police, or the child has grown up.
She knows the names of many of the victims - names she says she could never use should she ever have children of her own. Those names will always be associated in her mind with certain faces, certain terrible visions.
With older material, the victim's story is often over and done. They were rescued - or they weren't. They've done what they could to put their life back together; or they didn't. They survived; or they are dead.
'Thanks to the vigilance of workers like Sally, Britain actually hosts the lowest level of child abuse material of any major nation.'
A short while ago, Sally found herself looking at a set of photos from an overseas website. The images were not actionable, but it was quite clear that they had been taken in a UK location.
In that case, the IWF passed them on to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the police agency responsible for dealing with child exploitation. They were able to identify the location and make use of the leads it created.
Sally and the other analysts not only have to distinguish real from fake images, but then make a judgment as to what level of abuse they fall under.
Child abuse material is graded on a five-point scale known as the Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP) scale, with level one indicating nudity or erotic posing with no sexual activity. Level five encompasses the most severe and depraved level of sexual abuse, including torture, sadism and bestiality.
Recently, Sally saw her first level five image involving a baby. She just clicked on a link and there it was: sickening, depraved.
She tries to shrug it off, calling it 'not one of those things you want to see last thing on a Friday' - but her hurt is written all over her face.
Driven: Sally is committed to her work and she
and her colleagues have coping strategies to deal with the horrors they
regularly witness
IWF will also call the police, if it is British-based, because behind that image is a criminal who can be brought to book. If the image originates from outside the UK, then the IWF's sister organisations overseas will be informed.
Despite the upsetting nature of their work, Sally, Sarah and Ian seem driven and each have developed their own coping strategies to deal with the horrors they witness daily.
For Sarah, who lives alone with tropical fish and a guinea pig, the long commute home to Bedford helps her return to blessed banality.
Sally, who lives in a rented flat with her boyfriend, goes to the gym after work to unwind or goes supermarket shopping; anything to put some sort of mindless activity in place as a buffer between work and home.
She says: 'Sometimes, if I've had a tough day, I'll send my partner an email to say “Can we have a sofa night?” which means staying in watching sci-fi movies. That will always take it away.
'I'm very lucky to have a boyfriend who is communicative and passionate about his own job. He is very proud of what I do and I'm proud of him.'
The nature of her work, she says, has changed her for the better.
'My perspective of what matters has changed. I'm a lot more focused on the positive, much more relaxed about the world. I enjoy the good people around me,' she says.
As I leave, Sally tells me that her job is a bit like giving blood. She doesn't like doing it, but someone has to. She trusted herself to do it; she wasn't so sure about anyone else. She wants to make a difference.
For more details on ways to help, visit iwf.org.uk. Do NOT go looking for this material. Downloading such images, regardless of motive, is a criminal offence.
dailymail.co.uk
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