Last year, the police set up a new national team with employees from all police regions, focusing specifically on identifying children who have been subjected to various types of documented sexual abuse. During 2025, the work has been implemented broadly – and it has yielded results.
Filtering better
Thanks to a new method, the team is working with its own analysis program featuring effective AI functions and a database from Interpol, and has been able to identify 600 Swedish children in images and films on the internet during the year.
Historically, we have had to look at each image and try to find the children and what they have been subjected to. There are so many files that we have felt a need to structure them. The new method involves using the program to go directly into the files that are interesting. We can filter and sort out more easily, says Louise Åhlén, operational developer at the police group Isöb at Noa, who works specifically with internet-related sexual abuse against children.
It's also the case that we now have a team behind us. If a child has been subjected to abuse on a social media platform right now, we have teams in each region that are specialized in finding those children and who they have been abused by. So we work partly with the software, partly with the people we need to connect with.
The analysis program does some of the filtering work itself, but the police must still keep a watchful eye over the process.
We have to put the puzzle together. It's not just the abuse itself we're looking for. We have to look for images that can tell us where the child is. It might be a sofa we're looking for.
Continuous development
The new analysis program is being developed all the time – and according to Louise Åhlén, it's essential for the police work to continue being successful.
If new things come up, we can develop faster. Since we're sitting in a team, we can always say "now we need this function or work like this" and that's maybe the best thing about this method, she says.
Being able to identify children in abuse images is more or less crucial for finding the perpetrators.
If we find the children, we usually find the perpetrator, says Louise Åhlén.
