EUROPE has become the global hotbed for hosting child abuse images amid fears predators are exploiting new website addresses to hide indecent material, research suggests.

The Internet Watch Foundation found the continent as a whole including Russia and Turkey now houses 60 per cent of the paedophile web pages.

3 More than half the world's paedophile website are hosted in Europe, a study found Credit: Getty Images

3 A graphic shows the percentage of child abuse websites hosted in different parts of the world

Europe leapfrogged North America, which in the last year hosted 37 per cent of paedo websites, down from 57 per cent in 2015.

The Netherlands topped the list of European nations hosting the illegal content, said the IWF.

The other countries in the top five were the US (22 per cent), Canada (15 per cent), France (11 per cent) and Russia (7 per cent).

In total 34,212 web pages were found to be displaying abuse content in Europe, up 19 per cent on the year before.

Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the IWF, said: "The situation is reversed from previous years. Europe is now the biggest host of child sexual abuse imagery, rather than North America."

The safety watchdog also found a sharp rise in the number of new website domains - using suffixes such as .ninja instead of .com - being tackled for posting abuse images, up 258 per cent since 2015.

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Its findings come as campaigners warned Theresa May websites on child-themed domains such as .kids face being sold without security preventing known paedophiles from hosting indecent content on them.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has created more than 1,000 new domains since 2012.

The Russian equivalent of .kids is already in use without child-protection safeguards, while Google and Amazon are among parties interested in the English domain, said John Carr, secretary to the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety.

There has been no indication .kids has yet been exploited by paedophiles, but Ms Hargreaves said: "Criminals will attempt to abuse new technologies for their own gain - in this case it's using new domain names."

She added: "The shift of child sexual abuse imagery hosting to Europe shows a reversal from previous years.

"Criminals need to use good internet hosting services which offer speed, affordability, availability and access.

"Services which cost nothing, and allow people to remain anonymous, are attractive."

3 Charities warned ministers criminals could exploit new internet domain names such as .kids Credit: Getty Images

Concerns about the lack of security in child-orientated domains were flagged to the Prime Minister, Culture Secretary Karen Bradley and Home Secretary Amber Rudd in a letter from the CHIS.

The coalition - made up of ten charities including Barnardo's and the NSPCC - warned the global body for selling domains and web addresses "shows complete indifference towards children's safety".

It added: "Their (Icann's) interest in maximising or securing their revenues appears sometimes to blind them to a larger obligation to protect the weak and vulnerable eg. in this instance children."

Responding to the IWF's figures, Mr Carr said: "The criminals have obviously spotted that these new domains now exist where they can sell or distribute child pornography and that should have never been allowed to happen and Icann could have stopped it altogether or mitigated it."

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