Almost one in three reported child abuse images are now taken by the children themselves, new figures from the Internet Watch Foundation show.

Children are increasingly filming or photographing themselves in explicit situations and sharing the footage, which then ends up on adult pornography sites or shared by paedophiles, the foundation's annual report found.

The report shows that there were 78,589 confirmed child sexual abuse URLs found in 2017, up from 57,335 in 2016.

A growing number of images discovered by the foundation’s staff were those which children had taken themselves as photos or via livestreaming apps.

The number of cases which involved "self-generated" content rose from 349 in January 2017 to 1,717 a year later, rising from six per cent of the total in January 2017 to 26 per cent in January 2018.

The average proportion of images discovered between November and February which were self-generated was 31 per cent, rising to a high of 40 per cent in December, according to figures seen by the Daily Telegraph.

"We increasingly see more imagery of 11-15 year olds in what is termed “self-produced” content created using webcams and then shared online. This can have serious repercussions for young people and we take this trend very seriously," the report said.