The Online Safety Bill does not go far enough to prevent children from accessing harmful pornographic content, which poses a serious risk to their mental health, and their understanding of consent and healthy relationships.
Many children are stumbling across pornographic content accidentally, including children as young as 7. Barnardo’s frontline workers say that children are participating in acts they have seen in pornographic videos, despite feeling uncomfortable and scared. The Government’s Equalities Office, found that there was ‘substantial evidence of an association’ between the use of pornography and harmful attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls.
Pornographic content which is suggests sexual activity with children is extremely harmful but is rife on mainstream pornography sites. This content normalises children as objects of sexual desire and drives the demand for ‘real’ child sexual abuse material. Such content is banned from DVD, Blu Ray, and Video on Demand, but is rife across mainstream pornography sites. Increasingly extreme pornography can legitimise abusive behaviour, meaning that some excessive users of pornography can spiral into viewing child sexual abuse material, and potentially even abusing children.
YouGov polling for Barnardo’s found that almost 70 per cent of UK adults (69%) agree that pornography which would be illegal on DVD should also be illegal online. For this reason, we are working as part of a coalition with 13 other organisations, including CEASE, NSPCC, The Internet Watch Foundation and The Children’s Society calling on Peers to support calls for the Online Safety Bill to:
- Require all pornography websites and social media platforms to implement the same robust age verification which ensures that regulated services are satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that a user is 18 years old or over. This should be brought in within six months of the Online Safety Bill becoming law.
- Address the parity between offline and online standards and protect children by preventing content from being uploaded online if it would fail to attain an R18 certification and contains prohibited content.