#Keep Kids Off Porn

#Keep Kids Off Porn

We are a coalition of charities and organisations who have joined forces in order to campaign to #KeepKidsOffPorn.

There is vast and compelling evidence of the harms being done to children in particular, and to society in general, as a result of the failure to protect under-18s from pornography.

Age Verification would go a very long way to help prevent this harm. The technology is proven to be effective and is readily available.

This measure attracts almost universal support. We rightly prevent children from buying porn magazines from newsagents, yet they have almost unfettered access to increasingly extreme online pornography which normalises and legitimises coercion, misogyny, and sexual violence against women and girls.

There is a wealth of evidence that children are stumbling upon pornography from as young as seven or eight, and Children’s Commissioner for England Rachel de Souza points out that peer pressure is giving many teenage boys little choice over whether to watch it. Pornography is shaping our children’s sexual attitudes and undermining their ability to form healthy and satisfying sexual relationships. In reducing women and girls to sex objects it fuels “rape culture”, normalising harmful attitudes and inciting sexual abuse and harassment in our homes, schools and universities. It is wreaking damage that can last a lifetime.

It should not be like this. Realising the damage done to children, the Conservatives pledged in their 2015 General Election Manifesto to introduce compulsory Age Verification. Yet in 2019 the Government suddenly cancelled plans to introduce it, literally just days before its roll-out. Since that crushing blow, and as a direct result of it, some 4 million more children have been exposed to pornography or its impact for the first time.

After more than two years since the Government’s devastating announcement that it would be postponing Age Verification, on 8th February 2022 (Safer Internet Day), they announced that they would introduce “world leading measures to protect children from accessing pornography online”. Digital Minister Chris Philp MP confirmed that the long-awaited Online Safety Bill will be “significantly strengthened with a new legal duty requiring all sites that publish pornography to put robust checks in place to ensure their users are 18 years old or over”.

The Bill should ensure that all porn sites, regardless of size and functionality, will have to implement Age Verification measures.

This announcement comes as a huge relief to parents, teachers, children’s rights groups, campaigners on violence against women and girls, and the many others fighting for fundamental safeguards for children. The mounting evidence of pornography’s harms to our children means that this is an issue we can no longer afford to ignore or delay.

Yet the swift and effective implementation of Age Verification cannot be taken for granted: its cancellation in 2019 proves that. After seven years of deferral, delay and broken promises, fast-tracking Age Verification is the least we can do to protect future generations.

Please sign our petition - and donate if you can - to help fund our campaign effort over the coming months to finally get this vital protection in place.

We are asking the Government to guarantee three key elements for the Online Safety Bill:

• Ensure that the standalone duty for robust, independent, standards-based Age Verification to protect children from exposure to pornography remains in the Online Safety Bill. 

• Include a statutory deadline for these Age Verification measures to commence within 6 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. 

• Give Ofcom powers to commence business disruption measures after seven days notice in respect of any non-compliant pornographic content.

We must not delay a moment longer. Age Verification is needed now, to give our children and young people the protection they deserve.

Help us to #keepkidsoffporn.

SIGNATORIES:
CEASE
5Rights Foundation
CARE
Dr Elly Hanson
John Carr OBE, Secretary to the Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety
Iain Corby, AVPA
Andrew Hawkins, Democracy 3.0