Online Safety Bill

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill’s commitment to protecting children online, yet, like many noble Lords, I fear that it is not yet robust enough. I am extremely concerned about the current unfettered access that children have to online pornography—pornography that is violent, misogynistic, racist and deeply disturbing in its content. For example, analysis of videos recommended to first-time users on three of the most popular porn sites, Pornhub, Xvideos, and xHamster, found that one in every eight titles described sexual activities that constitutes sexual violence as defined by the WHO. In most cases, that violence is perpetrated against women, and, in those videos, the women respond to that violence either with pleasure or neutrality. Incest was the most frequent form of sexual violence recommended to users. The second most common category recommended was that of physical aggression and sexual assault. This is not the dark web, or some far corner of the internet; these are mainstream porn sites, and they are currently accessed every month by 1.4 million UK children.

Research released yesterday by the Children’s Commissioner states that the average age at which children first see pornography is 13. Accessing this brutal and degrading content has a devastating impact on their psychological, emotional, neurological and sexual well-being. I recommend a YouTube video called “Raised on Porn”, if noble Lords want to see the damage it can do. Boys grow up to believe that girls must enjoy violent sex acts, and girls are growing up to believe that they must enjoy painful and humiliating acts, such as anal sex and strangulation. Anecdotal evidence shows that the 5,000% increase in the number of girls going through puberty now wishing to identify as male is at least partly driven by seeing this vile porn and coming to the conclusion that they would rather not be women if that is what sex involves. Yet the Online Safety Bill does little to address this. While it includes regulations on age verification, pornography will not be defined as a primary priority content until secondary legislation. Furthermore, according to the Ofcom implementation road map, multiple consultations and processes also need to be undertaken. As we have heard from other noble Lords, it may not be until 2027 or 2028 before we see robust age verification. We cannot wait that long.

Mainstream porn consists of acutely hardcore content, which, although it does not meet the narrow definition of illegal content, is none the less extremely harmful, especially when viewed by children. Depictions of sexual coercion, abuse and exploitation of vulnerable women and children, the incest porn I have already mentioned, humiliation, punishment, torture and pain, and child sexual abuse are commonplace. In the offline world, that content would be prohibited under the British Board of Film Classification guidelines, yet it remains online with no provisions in the Bill to address the staggering gap between the online and offline worlds. That is despite the Government recognising in their own research that

“there is substantial evidence of an association between the use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women.”

Amending the Bill to protect women and children need not be a difficult task. As many noble Lords have mentioned, provisions were made to address those issues in the Digital Economy Act, although they were not implemented. We must not make those mistakes again and allow the Bill to pass without ensuring robust protections for children and society at large.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Lords Chamber

Thousands of children over the years have been let down. We know the harm that is caused by pornography. We legislated in 2017 to stop that harm, yet if the Ofcom road map is accurate it could be two or three more years before pornography is regulated. That is unacceptable. We must ensure that we do all we can to bring in age verification as quickly as possible.

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I too add my support to Amendments 123A, 142, 161, 183, 184, 185, 297, 300 and 306. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Bethell and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for putting before us such a comprehensive list of amendments seeking to protect children from a host of online harms, including online pornography. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who, through her Amendment 185, draws our attention to the horrifying material that is prohibited in the offline world though is inexplicably legal in the online world. I also lend my support to Amendment 306 in the name of noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, in relation to the swift implementation of age verification for pornography. I am sorry to have jumped the queue.

I spoke at Second Reading on the harms of pornography to children, but so much more evidence has come to my notice since then. I recently wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph about age verification, which resulted in my inbox being absolutely flooded by parents saying, “Please keep going”. There are probably noble Lords here who feel that we have spoken enough about pornography over the last few weeks, but anybody who has watched any of this would, I am afraid, beg to differ. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for quoting from another email I received in response to that article, which is relevant to today’s debate. A young man wrote:

“When I first visited online porn, I was about 12”.


Incidentally, that is the average age at the first exposure. He said:

“I can remember feeling that this was ‘wrong’ but also that it was something that all boys do. I had no idea about masturbation, but that soon followed, and I was able to shake off the incredibly depressive sensation of having done something wrong after finishing by finding many online resources informing me that the practice was not bad, and actually quite healthy. Only over the past 3 years have I been able to tackle this addiction and I am now 31.


I will try and keep this letter as succinct as possible, but I believe the issue of pornography is at the root of so many issues in society that nobody, no man at least, seems willing to speak about it openly. If you research what happens in the brain of a person viewing pornography”,


especially when so young,

“you see that the dopamine receptors get so fried it’s almost as bad as a heroin experience and far more addictive. Far more addictive, in that I can just log on to my phone and open Pandora’s box at any time, anywhere, and it’s all free.

I’ll tell you that I became alienated from women, in that I became afraid of them. Perhaps out of guilt for looking at pornography. Instead of having the confidence to ask a girl out and experience an innocent teenage romance, I would be in my room looking at all sorts of images.


The human brain requires novelty, mine does at least, so soon you find yourself veering off from the boring vanilla porn into much darker territories.


The internet gives you access to literally everything you could possibly imagine, and the more you get sucked down the rabbit hole, the more alienated you become from your peers. You are like an addict searching for your next hit, your whole world revolves around your libido and you can’t actually look at a woman without fantasising about sex.


Then if you do manage to enter into a relationship, the damage this causes is beyond comprehension. Instead of living each moment with your partner, you end up in a dual relationship with your phone, masturbating behind their back. In fact, your partner can’t keep up with the porn, and you end up with issues with your erections and finding her attractive.


Whenever you would watch information about porn on TV or the internet, you would be told that it should be encouraged and is healthy. You end up trying to watch porn with your partner, and all the weird psychological ramifications that has. You go further down the rabbit-hole, but for some reason nothing feels right and you have this massive crippling depression following you wherever you go in life”.


I hope noble Lords will forgive me for reading that fairly fully. It is a tiny illustration, and it is typical of how pornography steals men’s childhoods and their lives. I discussed this with young men recently, and one told me that, because he had been in Dubai—where there is no access to it—for a month, he feels much better and plans to keep away from this addictive habit. When young men reach out to Peers because they have nowhere else to go, we must surely concede that we have failed them. We have failed generations of boys and girls—girls who are afraid to become women because of what they see—and, if we do not do something now, we will fail future generations.