An open letter led by children’s charity Barnardo’s and Cease (Centre to End all Sexual Exploitation) is calling on the next Government to commit to tackling the widespread harms caused by online pornography.
The letter to the leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats parties, calls for action to include:
- Passing legislation to ensure that pornographic content is regulated online the same way that it is offline
- Ensuring the robust implementation of highly effective age assurance to prevent children accessing pornographic content wherever it is found online:
- Committing to continuing the Independent Pornography Review, led by Baroness Bertin
The letter includes signatures from the Internet Watch Foundation, Lucy Faithfull Foundation, Rape Crisis England & Wales, Internet Matters and Marie Collins Foundation.
Lynn Perry, Barnardo’s chief executive, said:
“Children are experiencing significant harm as a result of regular exposure to extreme pornography online. Much of this content would be illegal on a DVD or a Blu-Ray, and it needs to be illegal online too.
“These videos and images are harming children’s mental health and wellbeing - and send the wrong message about consent and healthy relationships. For adults, content that frequently sexualises children can be a pathway to engaging with images of child sexual abuse.
“The Online Safety Act is an important step forward, but we need to go further to keep children safe. We urge the next UK government to make sure that content that wouldn’t be legal on a DVD is also illegal on a website or social media.”
Dr Lucie Moore, Chief Executive of CEASE, said: “The burden of protecting children from the harms of online pornography must not lie solely with parents.
“Given the number of lawsuits in action against Pornhub and its parent company, Aylo, for trafficking and profiting from the filmed sexual abuse of others, we are calling on the next government to hold Ofcom to account and ensure they set the bar for age verification and set it high.
“The pornography industry has had countless opportunities to implement robust age verification to prevent children from accessing their material, but they have repeatedly chosen profits over basic safeguarding. The next government must stand up to the technology and pornography industry to ensure children are protected to the highest degree.”
Letter:
We are a coalition of charities, academics, practitioners deeply concerned about the extreme and harmful pornographic content that is freely available online. This content is having devastating impacts across society including driving violence against women and girls and the sexualisation of children.
While significant gains were made in the Online Safety Act 2023 in protecting children from accessing pornographic content online through the introduction of age verification, much more needs to be done to regulate online pornographic content.
We are calling on the next Government to commit to tackling the widespread harms caused by online pornography. This should include by:
Passing legislation to ensure that pornographic content is regulated online the same way that it is offline:
- Swathes of content that would be prohibited offline by the BBFC, so illegal to own on DVD, Blu-Ray and for Video on Demand is now readily available online, for free, in just a few clicks.
- This includes content that sexualises children – adult actors made to look like children through props, clothes, and child-like language – and content that depicts sexual violence, most often towards women and girls.
- Watching online pornography normalises sexual aggression, risky sexual practices and men’s violent sexual domination over women. It reduces women and girls to objects on whom acts of sex and violence are acted out.
- The Government Equalities Office concluded that pornography is a driver of sexual violence both inside and outside of ‘consensual’ sexual relationships and encounters.
- There is also evidence that viewing this violent content can act as a ‘gateway’ to more extreme and violent material, including illegal child sexual abuse material. This content therefore poses an immediate child protection risk.
Ensuring the robust implementation of highly effective age assurance to prevent children accessing pornographic content wherever it is found online:
- We welcome the introduction of highly effective age assurance to protect children from online pornographic content in the Online Safety Act. However, there is a need to ensure that this is implemented effectively and robustly to protect children.
- We are calling for Ofcom to include a numerical definition of what highly effective age assurance means to enable the same standard of compliance across the industry, and aid enforcement where necessary. For example, ‘highly effective age assurance means technology which is effective at identifying users under the age of 18 years old 99% of the time’.
- Viewing pornographic content online has a huge impact on children’s mental health, and also distorts their views of healthy sex and relationships.
- Ofsted’s review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges found that ‘sexual harassment, including online sexual abuse, has become ‘normalised’ for children and young people.’ It highlighted how easy access to pornography had set unhealthy expectations of sexual relationships and shaped perceptions about women and girls.
- A 2023 report by the Children’s Commissioner for England found that: ‘frequent users of pornography are more likely to engage in physically aggressive sex acts’.
Committing to continuing the Independent Pornography Review, led by Baroness Bertin which was created to:
- advise government on ways to tackle the harmful impact of pornography on viewers and how abuse and exploitation is addressed in the modern industry.
- assess law enforcement for online pornography and whether more needs to be done to tackle illegal pornography.
Addressing the widespread and harmful impacts of pornography must be a key priority for the incoming government if it is to tackle the endemic crisis of violence against women and girls, and child sexual abuse across the United Kingdom.
Please do contact us if you have any queries or require any further information, and we would be happy to have a meeting to discuss this issue further.
Lynn Perry MBE, Chief Executive, Barnardo’s
Dr Lucie Moore, Chief Executive, CEASE
Susie Hargreaves, Chief Executive, Internet Watch Foundation
Deborah Denis, CEO, Lucy Faithfull Foundation
Ciara Bergman CEO, Rape Crisis England & Wales
Carolyn Bunting MBE, CO-CEO, Internet Matters
Victoria Green, Chief Executive, Marie Collins Foundation
Jonathan Baggaley, CEO, PSHE Association
Dr Elly Hanson, Clinical Psychologist and researcher
Ross Hendry, Chief Executive, CARE
Ian Henderson, CEO & Founder, Naked Truth
Farah Hussain, Director, UK Feminista