Ask pornography sites and the government to protect children more

21^st May 2023

Dear Prime Minister,

We are writing to urge you to take action to protect children from seeing harmful and extreme pornography online.

To keep children safe, we need to make sure we have the same standards online as we rightly demand offline.

Later this week, the House of Lords will be debating amendments to the Online Safety Bill which promises a step-change in protecting children from harmful pornographic content and predatory contact online. The Government has rightly set out an ambition to make the UK the safest place in the world for children to be online. However, unless the Bill is strengthened, this aim will simply not be achieved.

We are concerned about a number of harms online, but the one harm that is plain for the whole nation to see is the stark reality that far too many children are seeing extreme and violent pornography at a very young age, often stumbling across it accidentally. Recent research by the Children’s Commissioner for England found that 1 in 10 nine-year-olds have seen pornographic content. As a father yourself, we are sure that you share parents’ concerns about their children seeing this inappropriate and harmful content.

The impact of online pornography on children is well understood. It can harm their mental health, distort their perceptions of healthy relationships and consent, and normalise abusive and violent sex. But despite this, children are still able to access harmful pornography at the click of a button and are left vulnerable to sexually motivated contact, with no blockers in place to stop them. Many images and videos that would be illegal to buy on DVD for example, are currently readily available and prevalent online, for free.

Pornography has a far-reaching, cross-societal impact. As well as causing harm to children, some pornography promotes violence against women and girls and can result in children being trafficked into the pornography industry. There is also evidence that legal content can act as a ‘gateway’ to extreme and hardcore material, including illegal child sexual abuse material. Some users go on to view content that is more and more extreme, until the next click is illegal child sexual abuse material.  In some cases, this leads to them contacting and abusing children online and offline. This content therefore poses an immediate risk to children.

Parliament has previously passed a law introducing age verification for pornography, under the Digital Economy Act, but decisions were taken by the Government at the time not to implement it. This has had a devasting impact. Children’s charity Barnardo’s has estimated that, since this decision was taken in October 2019, it is likely that children have accessed harmful pornography 54 million times.

That is why amendments laid by Baroness Kidron, which would place a duty on companies to ensure beyond reasonable doubt that a user is over 18, are critical to protect children from pornography. This technology already exists. It is already used extensively in everyday life, and reliably ensures that the user’s privacy is protected. As it is, we risk leaving pornography behind. We are also championing an amendment, tabled by Baroness Benjamin, with cross-party support to ensure that content is regulated online the same way that it is offline.

In other jurisdictions, like France, we have seen how the pornography industry has fought to find loopholes and avoid age verification measures when the legislation has been unclear.  Why do we think it won’t do that here?

For all these reasons, we believe the Government must amend the Online Safety Bill in three ways to better protect children. These changes are widely supported across charities, and other organisations:

1. Implement the effective age assurance schedule that places an obligation on providers of pornographic content to ensure beyond reasonable doubt that children cannot access pornography on their platform through robust age verification. This should apply to all online content including social media.
2. Apply the same rules that prohibit offline content to online and across all platforms.
3. Put a duty on pornography companies to verify the age and consent of performers in pornographic content. 

We cannot afford to let the opportunity to protect children through the Online Safety Bill slip through our fingers. We hope the Government recognises the importance of these amendments and adopts them.

Barnardo's and signatories.

Baroness Benjamin OM DBE DL

Baroness Kidron, Chair of 5Rights Foundation

Rt Hon. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top

Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee

Baroness Newlove

Baroness Bertin

Baroness Parminter

Baroness Prashar CBE

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill

Baroness Grey-Thompson DBE DL

Baroness Jolly

Baroness Hussein-Ece

Baroness Janke

Baroness Thornhill MBE

Baroness Randerson

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick

Baroness Lister of Burtersett

Lord Alton of Liverpool

Lord Browne of Belmont

Lord Foster of Bath

Rt Hon Lord McNally

Lord Morrow of the Clogher Valley

Lord McColl of Dulwich

Lord Rennard MBE

Lord Russell of Liverpool

Rt Reverend Dr Steven Croft, Bishop of Oxford

Rt Reverend Andrew Watson, Bishop of Guildford

Rt Hon Dame Diana Johnson DBE MP

Tim Loughton MP

Sarah Champion MP

Taiwo Owatemi MP

Rt Hon Kelly Tolhurst MP

Rt Hon Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

Steve McCabe MP

Janet Finch-Saunders MS, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Welsh Parliament

Darren Millar MS

Rhianon Passmore MS

APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Lynn Perry MBE, Chief Executive of Barnardo’s

Naomi Miles, Founder and Chair of CEASE

Georgia Harrison

Sir Peter Wanless, CEO, NSPCC

Ruth Davison, CEO of Refuge

Ellen Miller, Interim CEO of Safelives

Sara Kirkpatrick, CEO of Welsh Women’s Aid

Mark Russell, CEO of The Children’s Society

Paul Carberry, CEO of Action for Children

Susie Hargreaves OBE, CEO of Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

Professor Phil Banfield, Chair of the British Medical Association Council

Deborah Denis, CEO of Lucy Faithfull Foundation

Ross Hendry, CEO of Care

UK Feminista

Laila Mackelwait, Founder and CEO of Justice Defense Fund

William Perrin, Trustee, Carnegie UK

Melissa Milner, Director of External Affairs and Partnerships at Catch 22

Vicki Shotbolt, CEO of Parentzone

Will Gardner OBE, CEO of Childnet and Director of UKSIC

Dawn Hawkins, CEO of National Centre on Sexual Exploitation

Haley McNamara, Director, International Centre on Sexual Exploitation

John Carr, Secretary of CHIS

Victoria Green, CEO of Marie Collins Foundation

David Wright, CEO SWGfL and Director of UKSIC

Emma Hardy, Director of UKSIC

Julia Beazley, Director of Public Policy, The Centre for Faith and Public Life

Andrew Hawkins, Director of Democracy 3.0

Lianna McDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Centre for Child Protection

NordicModelNow!

Gretchen Peters, Executive Director, Alliance to Counter Crime Online

Helen Taylor, Vice-President of Exodus Cry

The Reward Foundation

Stephen Kinsella, Founder, Clean Up The Internet

Professor Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics (Department of Media and Communications)

Dr Elly Hanson, Clinical Psychologist and author of Pornography and Human Futures

Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE

Abhilash Nair, Associate Professor of Internet Law, University of Exeter

Carole Murphy, Director of Bakhita Centre for Research on Slavery Exploitation and Abuse, Associate Professor, Criminology and Sociology, Faculty of Business and Law, St Mary’s University

Neena Samota, Programme Director for Criminology and Sociology at St Mary’s University

Paulette Simpson CBE

To the owners of the most-viewed pornography websites in the UK,

We are writing to you as representatives of UK based children’s, human rights and violence against women and girls organisations as well as concerned individuals, about the disturbing prevalence of harmful and violent content on your pornography websites. Research from leading academics has found that many commercial pornography sites have ‘depictions of practices that meet criminal standards of sexual violence, including rape, incest and [image-based sexual abuse, known as] so-called ‘revenge porn’, (and) are labelled in ways that not only minimise or remove their criminality, but often mock or belittle the possibility of harm’.¹ 

In 2015/16 pornography was accessed 1.4 million times by UK children every month. That number is likely to be higher now due to the increase in time spent online during and post pandemic. Therefore, at the very minimum over the next three years children could access pornography over 50 million times.  

Evidence from the British Board of Film Classification shows that children are stumbling onto your sites accidently from as young as seven. As you will know, following representations from Barnardo’s and the many other organisations who have signed this letter, the UK Government has introduced legislation (the Online Safety Bill), placing a legal requirement on commercial pornography sites to implement age verification. This is an important step forward but it could take up to three years for the legislation to be implemented. We are calling on you to work together to introduce vital age verification measures as soon as possible to prioritise the safety of children. 

Barnardo’s frontline services say children they support are watching pornography depicting illegal acts, violence and child sexual abuse. We see first-hand that watching this content harms children’s mental health and can normalise aggressive, coercive and harmful sexual activity.  

Despite pornography websites stating that harmful, violent and illegal content is prohibited, it remains visible, including to children. We also have concerns about the way content is categorised, with some sites including terms that reference children, incest, abuse and harassment. 

Last year the Everyone’s Invited website detailed thousands of accounts of abuse, rape, harassment, assault and misogyny from children as young as nine in the UK. The subsequent review by the education regulator Ofsted identified the viewing of harmful pornography online as a driver of these behaviours, and school leaders ‘highlighted the problems that easy access to pornography had created and how pornography had set unhealthy expectations of sexual relationships and shaped children and young people’s perceptions of women and girls’.² 

Police and practitioners are also becoming concerned about the increasing number of young men who have developed an interest in child sexual abuse material via mainstream online pornography. Experts agree that people watching abuse-themed pornography, increasingly widespread on the most watched sites, is making it easier for them to take the next step of watching real abuse of real children.³ 

We do acknowledge that steps have been taken to protect children, such as Mindgeek’s recent deterrence collaboration with The Lucy Faithfull Foundation. However, with children easily accessing pornography every day and viewing content that is extremely harmful, so much more needs to be done to keep them safe.

We are calling on you as leaders of the industry to come together and implement measures that will prevent harmful, abusive and illegal content being viewed by children across the country. Please begin the process of implementing robust age verification on your sites at the earliest possible opportunity and take active steps to ensure the content on your sites meets the British Board of Film Classification standards for permissible pornographic material which can be purchased on DVD in the UK.   

Children cannot afford to wait any longer for these changes to be made.

Barnardo's and signatories.

Footnotes

1 Sexual violence as a sexual script in mainstream online pornography , Fiona Vera-Gray, Clare McGlynn, Ibad Kureshi, Kate Butterby - 2021 

² Review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) 

³ How extreme porn has become a gateway drug into child abuse | Pornography | The Guardian 

Lynn Perry MBE, Chief Executive, Barnardo’s 

Geoff Barton, General Secretary, The Association of School and College Leaders

Baroness Benjamin DBE OBE

Baroness Bertin  

Carolyn Bunting MBE, CEO, Internet Matters 

Jayne Butler, CEO Rape Crisis England & Wales 

Rosie Caldwell, CEO, Plan International UK 

John Carr, Secretary, UK Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety 

Sarah Champion MP 

Stella Creasy MP 

Deborah Denis, Chief Executive, The Lucy Faithfull Foundation 

Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England  

Gillian Finch, Manager, CIS'ters 

Will Gardner, Chief Executive, Childnet 

Dr Elly Hanson, Clinical Psychologist & Research Director of Fully Human, an initiative of the PSHE Association 

Ben Lake MP 

Tim Loughton MP 

Nick Martlew, Executive Director, 5Rights  

Laila Mickelwait, Founder/CEO, Justice Defense Fund

Vanessa Morse, Chief Executive, CEASE (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation) 

Farah Nazeer, CEO, Women’s Aid Federation of England 

Dr Charlotte Proudman, Barrister  

Lord Russell of Liverpool 

Mark Russell, CEO, The Children’s Society

Liz Saville-Roberts MP 

Lauren Seager-Smith FRSA, CEO, Kidscape 

Andrea Simon, Director, End Violence Against Women Coalition 

Dr Nadia Wager, Acting Director of the None in Three Research Centre for the Global Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, University of Huddersfield 

Peter Wanless, Chief Executive, NSPCC 

Kate Wareham, Director of Young People and Families,  Catch 22  

Hywel Williams MP 

Tania Woodgate, Chief Executive Officer, Male Survivors Partnership 

Jane Dodds MS

Heledd Fychan MS

Sioned Williams MS

Jayne Bryant MS

Natasha Ashgar MS

Darren Millar MS

John Griffiths MS

Mark Isherwood MS