The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said that websites and broadband providers are promptly acting at removing images of child sexual abuse.

Internet companies are now taking half of the time they use to take one year before to respond to complaints relating to this issue, according to BBC News.

The IWF, however, warned that images were being distributed more widely by abusers in an attempt to avoid detection. They also use legitimate picture and file sharing services fro this.

The IWF in its annual report said that UK websites have taken prompt action to the 72 requests for images removal by the charity, as they have taken down the images within few hours.

An improvement has been seen for sites hosted overseas, where internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosts took an average of 12 days to comply compared to 30 days in 2009.

The site from which the abusive content cannot be removed is added to a watch list, which is used by almost all UK broadband and mobile providers to block access sites hosting images of abuse.

The BBC News quotes the IWF annual report saying that the list included a total of 14,602 web pages, with an average of 59 new sites being added each working day.

The charity said, in 2010, a growth of 89% has been observed in the number of individual web pages identified as hosting images of child abuse, cautioning the growth indicates the problem is getting worse.

IWF spokeswoman Lene Nielsen was quoted by BBC as saying that the number of ‘dedicated’ sites, set up to host images of child abuse had remained static, with about 1,300 known sites.

The IWF applauded the efforts of the Internet industry for doing a good job of policing itself in the UK, but expressed concern over the global nature of the web remained a problem in combating child abuse.

Forty-two per cent of illegal images sites were hosted in North America, followed by 41% in Europe, including Russia; and 17% were in Asia.

The domains .ru (Russia), .jp (Japan), .es (Spain), .net, .com and .org. host majority of the illegal child abuse content, the IWF report said.