Five years since it was first announced and after numerous redrafts, the Online Safety Bill returned to the Commons on Monday to begin its final legislative stages. This landmark Bill deals with a wide variety of issues but there is one overriding harm that must be addressed. The Online Safety Bill must end the horror of children watching pornography online.
There has been no other time in history, when we have exposed children to the type of content they find online. If you are over a certain age, you might associate pornography with top-shelf magazines. The modern reality of internet pornography is completely different. Users are just a click away from videos of women being slapped, strangled or tortured. Many videos depict non-consensual sex and sexual activity involving children. And some of this is available on the most mainstream social media sites.
In 2008, just 14% of children under the age 13 had seen pornography. By 2011 that figure had risen to 49%, coinciding with the rise of children owning smart phones. Studies have shown that children’s consumption of pornography profoundly impacts on their psychological and sexual well-being and porn has been associated with a dramatic increase in child-perpetrated sexual abuse.
After a website called “Everyone’s Invited” began documenting the nature and extent of sexual abuse experienced by children in schools, an OFSTED review revealed that the most prevalent victims of serious sexual assault among the under 25s are schoolgirls aged 15-17. And this correlation has been observed by the Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales, the Independent Inquiry for Child Sexual Abuse, the Children’s Commissioner and OFSTED.
This unprecedented sexual experiment on our children cannot continue. Some still deny that there is a need for regulation and believe that responsibility for keeping children safe lies solely with parents. But no matter how many restrictions a parent imposes, classmates can and do share content on phones and the reality is that a child is only as safe as the least protected child in their class.
So I firmly believe that legislation is necessary to keep children safe online. However more is still required to ensure that the protection is sufficiently strong. First, the statutory obligation for “age verification” needs to be spelt out and made as strong as possible. Facial recognition technology and passport details have both been mentioned by Ministers but it is still unclear how tightly this obligation will be drawn. Second, the Bill needs to 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 for offline publication, why should it be different online?
In the last decade the internet has become Wild West which poses particular danger to children. The time has come for a strengthened Online Safety Bill to redress the balance.