Online Safety Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I support this important Bill, but with some concerns. As drafted, it does not go far enough to fully protect children and young people online. The consequences of the policies we decide in this Bill will affect the whole of society in decades to come.

I have been working on the online pornography issue for the last 10 years. In April 2017, this House passed legislation that required age verification for pornography websites to prevent children accessing them. We were promised that social media platforms would be included later on, but that did not happen. It is hard to believe that almost six years ago this House passed the Digital Economy Act, whose Part 3 was never implemented by this Government. So here we are, still debating age verification for pornography. This is simply unacceptable—a shocking failure of society. It is now time to act fast, and we must make sure that we do it right.

I am concerned that the Bill does not go as far as what was passed in 2017. Even if the Bill is passed, I do not believe that it will deliver age verification quickly. If Ofcom’s road map on the implementation of the Bill is to be believed, it could be three years before enforcement proceedings are issued against pornography websites that allow children to access them.

Research by the BBFC found that children as young as seven are innocently stumbling across pornography online and that 51% of all children aged 11 to 13 have watched pornography online—according to Barnardo’s, 54 million times. We are creating a conveyor belt of children addicted to porn, which will affect their long-term well-being and sexual behaviour.

A fundamental problem with the Bill is that it does not deal with pornography as a harm. The Government state that it is designed to ensure that what is lawfully unacceptable offline would also be unacceptable online. However, in respect of pornographic content, the Bill as drafted does not meet that goal. Material that is extreme and prohibited offline is widely available online. Evidence shows that consumption of extreme and prohibited material, such as content that sexualises children—and that includes adults dressing up as children—can lead on to the viewing of illegal child sexual abuse material and an interest in child sex abuse. It is not only children who are at risk: men who watch extreme and prohibited material online are more likely to be abusive towards women and girls.

What is needed is a stand-alone part of the Bill that deals with all pornographic content and sets out a clear definition of what pornography is. Once defined, the Bill should require any website or social media platform with content that meets that definition to ensure that children cannot access that material, because porn can be a gateway to other harms. Contrary to what some people believe, technology exists that can accurately age-verify a user without compromising that person’s privacy. The groundwork is done, and as more countries implement this type of legislation, the industry is becoming increasingly equipped to deal with age verification. France and Germany are already taking legal action to enforce their own laws on the largest adult websites, with several already applying age checks. There is no reason why this cannot be implemented and enforced within six months of the Bill becoming law. If that is too hard for the social media platforms, they can simply remove porn from their pages until they are ready to keep that harm away from our kids.

Childhood lasts a lifetime, and we have the opportunity to ensure that pornography is not a harm inflicted on our children. We owe it to them. I declare an interest as vice-president of Barnardo’s.