The growth in online child sexual exploitation and abuse material (CSEM) is a significant challenge for European law enforcement agencies (LEAs). Referrals of CSEM exceed the capacity of LEAs to respond in a practical and timely manner. GRACE (Global Response Against Child Exploitation) aims to equip European law enforcement agencies with advanced analytical and investigative capabilities to respond to the spread of online CSEM that will help safeguard victims and prosecute offenders.

GRACE will apply proven techniques in machine learning and artificial intelligence to the referral and analysis process while embracing the technical, ethical and legal challenges unique to fighting CSE. GRACE will leverage resources already in place at Europol and the nine MS LEAs within the consortium aiming to provide results early, frequently and flexibly.

GRACE is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project that aims to equip LEAs with advanced digital and analytical tools that improve their operational capacity to address child sexual exploitation material. Web-IQ is one of 22 organizations across 14 countries in Europe that have come together to deliver GRACE, the project will run until 2023 and has received €6.8m in funding.

Web-IQ’s main fields of expertise are the creation of high-quality datasets from online sources, with a specific focus on the Darkweb, and automating OSINT workflows. Web-IQ believes that LEAs should have the best online intelligence tools and data available to help them in their fight against serious crimes. We are especially invested in the fight against CSE and this has had our special attention since Web-IQ was founded in 2011. Our contributions to the GRACE project will be our expertise in the fields of web crawling, open source intelligence gathering, our Darkweb knowledge and the knowledge we bring with us from the AviaTor project.

For more information about GRACE, visit project website at https://grace-fct.eu or follow the project’s progress on Twitter @grace_fct_eu.

GRACE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement Number 883341.

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