It’s time to stop the sexualisation of children
Childhood lasts a lifetime. We are all shaped – for better or worse – by what we go through as children. But I fear that the days of an intergenerational, shared understanding of childhood are gone. Thanks to the unfettered access to, and proliferation of, online pornography, childhood looks very different now to how it looked just 15 or 20 years ago.
The average age at which a child first sees pornography is 13. About 1.4 million children in the UK access online pornography every month. In an NSPCC survey, almost half (44 per cent) of boys aged 11 to 16 said pornography gave them ideas about the type of sex they wanted to try.
Hasn’t this always been the case, I hear some people say? Haven’t children always experimented and chased their curiosity as a natural part of growing up? To a certain extent, this is right. But having free and easy access to degrading, violent online pornography is very different to seeing the photographs from pornographic magazines of old.
It is a fact that the vast majority of us – very young parents excluded – did not have the type of childhood our children are having now. Most of us weren’t raised with touchscreens able to show us anything and everything we ask for within a few seconds. We weren’t raised by people who have grown up in a culture in which pornography has become mainstream.
The common markers of childhood – like wearing school uniform, eating sweets, wearing your hair in pigtails, playing with toys, or interacting with your teacher in a classroom – are now markers of one of the most popular genres of pornography, “teen porn”.
Pornography platforms and social media are awash with content that depicts sexual activity with petite, young-looking adult performers made to look underage through props such as stuffed toys and school clothes.
Websites hosting pornography receive tens of billions of searches annually, with one of the most frequent search terms being “teen”. Violence is a common theme in videos featuring this keyword.
Indeed, according to an analysis of the most accessed pornographic websites in the UK, the three most common words in videos analysed as coercive or exploitative were “schoolgirl”, “girl” and “teen”.
Although many commercial pornography sites have banned specific search terms like “children” and “underage”, research from the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation has found that content may still be described with search tags such as “young” or “barely legal”.
As vice-president of Barnardo’s, I have heard first hand from people working in childhood trauma projects about the rise in child-on-child sexual abuse, often with early access to online pornography being a factor.
Pornography that depicts sexual activity with child-like performers or between family members can affect children who see this content, thereby normalising abuse and violence.
Viewing content which sexualises children can even be a gateway to viewing and seeking out illegal child sexual abuse material, and potentially even contacting and abusing children on and offline.
With four decades’ worth of research highlighting these issues, the pornography industry’s refusal to acknowledge them and accept proper accountability or regulation is to be roundly condemned.
Furthermore, this apparent refusal to accept any culpability, when combined with the continued promotion of harmful and sometimes illegal material to consumers, means we are dealing with people for whom I believe profit is the only goal, with no room for even a modicum of respect for humanity.
When it comes to regulation of the offline pornography industry, however, it’s a completely different matter. Since 1984, legislation has existed to specifically prohibit content that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) would find unsuitable for classification, including in the R18 category.
The BBFC will not classify any pornographic content that is illegal or any material that is potentially harmful, for example because it depicts and/or promotes child sexual abuse, trafficking or some harmful acts.
The obvious question therefore, is why doesn’t this legislation already exist to protect us online too? I have been asking this question for over a decade now. That is what I, and many others, are hoping the Online Safety Bill will be able to address, through an amendment I have laid which eliminates the discrepancy in regulation between online and offline pornographic content.
It is heartening to see that the Government has now pledged to name pornography in the primary legislation of the Bill, meaning that limits on access to online pornography – like age verification – can start sooner. But the Online Safety Bill must go further to ensure that material which is proven to be harmful is prohibited online as it is offline. It is now our best chance to end the sexualisation of childhood.
Porn platforms are awash with depictions of sexual activity with performers made to look underage