We must protect our children by introducing age verification for pornography sites
After five years of drafting, and having outlived six Secretaries of State, the Online Safety Bill is in its final legislative stages. This landmark Bill deals with a wide variety of issues, but there is one overriding harm that must be addressed: it needs to end the horror of children viewing online pornography.
If you are over a certain age, you may associate pornography with top shelf magazines or X-rated movies rented from an adult entertainment store. But the world has moved on; there is nothing entertaining about the pornography that is now available online. In this new era of pornographic content, violence is de rigueur. Users are just a click away from videos of women being slapped, choked, gagged, strangled, tortured and gang raped. Many videos depict non-consensual sex, sexual activity with children and acts far to obscene to describe.
Violent porn is not some niche corner of the internet that committed enthusiasts must seek out.
In 2019, pornography sites received more website traffic than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Zoom, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined. A third of the entire internet is porn.
And while opinions will vary about whether violent and abusive content should be available to adults, polling shows that the vast majority of Britons believe that there should be robust controls in place to stop children seeing pornography online.
This is why it is so necessary that, through the Online Safety Bill, we introduce age verification for pornography sites. Online pornography is now accessed by 1.4 million UK children every month and a shocking 50 per cent of 12-year-olds have seen it, with alarming consequences.
Studies have shown that children’s consumption of pornography profoundly impacts their psychological and sexual wellbeing, and porn has been associated with a dramatic increase in child-on-child sexual abuse.
This destruction of childhood innocence will have long term consequences for society as a whole.
The sexual ideas and behaviours we are exposed to in puberty form an “erotic imprint” for life and pornography rewires boys’ brains to believe that “normal” sex involves violence, pain and degrading acts. According to some studies, around 44 per cent of boys who view porn say that it gives them ideas about the “kind of sex they want to try”, and strangulation during sex is now so unexceptional that it is the second most common cause of stroke in young women.
This unprecedented sexual experiment on our children cannot continue, but there are still some who deny the need for regulation and believe that responsibility for protecting children lies solely with parents. They neglect the fact that no matter how many restrictions parents impose on a child’s device or internet access, classmates can – and do – share content with one another. A child is only as safe as the least-protected child in their class. So it is imperative that we legislate to protect children.
However, the Online Safety Bill in its current form has several weaknesses to be addressed. Firstly, the Bill should tighten – and accelerate – age verification requirements. Secondly, it must give equal treatment to dedicated pornography sites and social media platforms on which user-generated porn is distributed. Lastly, there is a clear disparity between pornographic material that is illegal offline (where strict rules about violence apply) and online (where anything goes). If extreme pornography is considered too obscene to be allowed offline, it must be banned online too.
Pornography may once have been seen as a private matter, and any attempt to regulate it was resisted as an assault on civil liberties. But to be a conservative is to believe that everything has limits. There are limits to how much personal freedom we can enjoy and how much privacy individuals can demand before our choices have intolerable consequences for wider society. We have unquestionably exceeded those limits when it comes to children and pornography. It is time for a (strengthened) Online Safety Bill to redress the balance.
This article was first published in The Telegraph in December 2022
