A/HRC/12/23 page 9 show that to be a growing one. One must wonder, however, if that growth is real or whether the bottom of the iceberg has simply been revealed. Do the data indicate a new upsurge in child pornography networks or has data-gathering simply improved because the authorities are more concerned with that phenomenon and allocating increased resources to combating it? Or is it a combination of both? 34. The number of sites devoted to child pornography worldwide is growing: 480,000 identified in 2004 compared to 261,653 in 2001. The number of predators connected to the Internet at any one time is estimated to be 750,000. 35. As of 19 April 2009, the National Centre on Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States, had since its creation in 1998, identified 592,044 out of a total of 681,275 sites as child pornography sites. In 2007 the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the United Kingdom received 34,871 reports, including 2,755 domains containing images of sexual abuse of children (80 per cent for commercial purposes and 20 per cent non-commercial); in 2008 it received 33,947 reports including 1,536 domains depicting sexual abuse of children (74 per cent for commercial purposes and 26 per cent for non-commercial storing or exchange). 36. Thousands of new photographs and videos are uploaded on to the Internet every week and hundreds of thousands of searches for images of sexual exploitation of children are carried out every day. Offenders may possess collections of over a million images of sexually exploited children. It is estimated that 200 new images are put into circulation every day. 37. Since child pornography is illegal, it is difficult to estimate the number of minors worldwide who are victims of these networks; estimates range from 10,000 to 100,000. Children of all ages, including babies, are exploited for pornographic purposes across the world. According to an American study, 83 per cent of individuals possessing child pornography material had images of children between the ages of 6 and 12; 39 per cent had images of children between the ages of 3 and 5; 19 per cent had images of babies and infants under the age of 3; and 87 per cent of perpetrators had very explicit images of prepubescent children.2 38. Images of sexually exploited children are not only growing in number but are also increasingly shocking. “The children in the images ... are suffering some of the cruellest forms of sexual abuse and ..., increasingly, appear to be younger.” The number of images “of serious child exploitation” quadrupled between 2003 and 2007 and 47 per cent of the websites assessed depicted grave child sexual abuse images in the most severe categories at levels 4 and 5.3 The number of domains identified as containing indecent images dropped in fact from 2007 to 2008 but there is no data on the number of sites containing serious forms of child pornography. 2 3 Information supplied by NCMEC for the preparation of this report, 2009. IWF annual report 2007, page 8. (http://www.iwf.org.uk/documents/20080417_ iwf_annual_report_2007_(web).pdf).