Attempting to tackle sexual violence by children while violent pornography remains readily available online is like treating “cocaine addicts while supplying them with cocaine”, Floella Benjamin has said.
In a letter to The Times, the Baroness and former TV star said that in the wake of the tragic death of Sarah Everard, more and more stories of sexual harassment and abuse are being revealed.
She said many are now coming to the realisation that this is partly driven by “violent online pornography available at the click of a mouse and on smartphones”.
‘Conveyor belt’
Lady Benjamin, who has repeatedly called for more safeguards to protect children from online pornography, wrote: “For the past nine years, I have been working to bring in measures to ensure that under-18s could not easily access online porn through age verification and that extreme illegal porn is blocked.”
She said The Digital Economy Act 2017 “would have made these two actions possible”, and that it broke her heart “when the government decided to abandon it” in October 2019.
She continued: “Education has a part to play, but if violent online porn continues to be readily available to under-18s it’s like trying to treat cocaine addicts while supplying them with cocaine”, adding that the measures contained in the Act need to be implemented “to make sure that we do not create a conveyor belt of sexual predators who go on to commit violence”.
Weak claims
Iain Corby of the Age Verification Providers Association, separately wrote: “Protagonists for the internet to remain unregulated often claim age verification will expose viewing habits to their families and to blackmailers.
“Using independently audited suppliers operating to international standards, age verification providers are more secure than the websites, many of which harvest personal data.
“The same groups say we should let parents solve the problem, but a parent can no more supervise all cybersurfing than they can go with a child on each visit to a newsagent. Shopkeepers are responsible for policing sales from their top shelf. The internet should be no different.”
Degrading
Calls for stronger protections come as a new report revealed the extent to which violent and criminal pornography can easily be accessed by children on the most popular porn sites.
The report, published in the British Journal of Criminology, found that one in eight videos on the homepages of the three biggest porn sites appeared to show non-consensual or incestuous acts – many of which were free to view with no age restrictions.
In total, 2,966 titles described criminal acts of image-based sexual abuse and a further 2,698 described coercion and exploitation. This included references to ‘rape porn’, which is illegal to possess or distribute in the UK, whether real or acted.
Exempt
Co-author and law professor Clare McGlynn QC said the findings were “shocking” and raised “serious questions about the extent of criminal material easily and freely available on mainstream porn websites and the efficacy of current regulatory mechanisms”. She lamented that such extreme acts were being “normalised”.
In response to the study’s findings, Conservative MP Caroline Noakes called for age-verification legislation, saying the report shows porn is giving young people “a very warped view of sex and relationships” and is “normalising” abusive behaviour.
Last month, the Government admitted that its proposed Online Safety Bill will not force commercial porn websites to implement age-verification checks for its users.
Speaking in the House of Lords, Culture minister Baroness Diana Barran revealed that protections in the Bill would not apply to porn websites which do not include user-generated content.
Porn sites could be exempt from age checks under online safety proposals