Urgent action is needed to address child access to online porn

Exactly a year ago, the UK Government performed one of the most extraordinary U-turns of the last 20 years.

On 16 October, Nicky Morgan told the House of Commons that plans to introduce age verification for online pornography were being abandoned, despite MPs and Peers approving the scheme and the regulations required to implement it.

Poised to lead

The UK had been poised to lead the world in the creation and implementation of age controls, but instead, the government chose to give it up. Instead, the issue of children watching online porn would be dealt with in a new Online Harms Bill as part of a ‘comprehensive approach’.

Everything was in place

What this means is yet more delays and what makes this especially frustrating is that, prior to the U-turn, everything was ready. The age verification scheme had been designed and age verification companies had got the technology set up. The Independent Regulator had been chosen and the British Board of Film Classification was ready and willing to do the job. Surely, if there’s one thing worse than not taking action to protect children online, it’s having the necessary technology and ability to make a change and then choosing to do nothing with it.

What’s made this situation more urgent is the enormous increase in children’s digital usage due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But the internet is like the Wild West. There’s little to no effective regulation. So while we protect young people from explicit content offline, we are failing to do so online. Our laws have simply not kept pace with the astonishing development of the internet and new technology.

Delay after delay

All that should have changed and the Conservative Party promised in its 2015 manifesto to introduce age verification. But since then, there’s been delay after delay and constant reframing of timetables and, five years on, age verification controls have still not been introduced. No one thinks these controls are perfect or some ‘magic silver bullet’ that will stop children accessing online porn. But they will help.

In society right now there’s a crisis of young people sending sexually explicit images of themselves to others. Data from 50 of Britain’s biggest secondary schools showed that more than a third of all sexting cases involved children aged 12 and 13.

More addictive than heroin

Moreover, there is strong evidence proving that children can become addicted to porn, just as adults can. Psychiatrist Dr Jeffrey Satinover has argued that: ‘It is as though we have devised a form of heroin 100 times more powerful than before, usable in the privacy of one’s home and injected directly to the brain through the eyes.’

Pornography is a distortion of God’s good gift of sex. It is a distortion that alienates us from one another and causes immense harm and pain. This is especially damaging to children and teenagers, whose views of what it means to be male and female and to relate as sexual beings are being formed and deformed by the horrific and abuse images and videos they are stumbling across online.

Contact your MP

Age verification was ‘oven ready’, to use one of the Prime Minister’s favourite phrases. Yet the government took this oven-ready system and threw it in the bin, for no good reason and to the detriment of children around the United Kingdom. Now is surely the time to contact your MP about this issue and urge them to support age verification and ask the government and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport to do the same.