Internet Pornography

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this matter tonight. I thank Members on both sides of the House who have either made time to attend the debate or expressed support for my proposal since it was announced yesterday. I am asking for a change in regulation that would require all UK-based internet service providers to restrict universal access to pornographic material by implementing a simple opt-in system based on age verification.

The internet is a phenomenon that has changed our lives. I well remember my new year’s resolution in 1996, which was to get to grips with this thing called the internet. Since then, there has been a massive growth in the size and complexity of the online world. In Britain today, more than 19 million households—73% of the total—have access to the internet, and the speed of access and complexity of content are growing all the time.

Children, with their annoying ability to be early adopters of new technology, are particularly heavy users of the internet, with 99% of 12 to 15-year-olds, 93% of eight to 11-year-olds and 75% of five to seven-year-olds saying that they use it regularly. We know that many obtain access in an unsupervised way, which is not surprising, given that 31% of 12 to 15-year-olds have internet access in their bedrooms. We also know that many children use this either knowingly or unknowingly to access pornography.

Pornography is one of the most widely available forms of content on the internet, representing 12% of the estimated 250 million global websites. Studies suggest, shockingly, that one in three British children aged 10—a third of our British 10-year-olds—have viewed pornography on the internet, while four out of every five children aged 14 to 16 admit to regularly accessing explicit photographs and footage on their home computers. The world has really changed.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I am very glad that the hon. Lady is raising this important issue tonight. Does she see, as I do, a connection between the figures to which she refers and the research by the End Violence Against Women coalition that suggests that a third of young girls experience unwanted sexual contact at school?

[Claire Perry]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point, as always. I will speak in a moment about the unpleasant impacts of access to pornography on our young girls and boys.

The numbers that I have just cited are drawn from a relatively small sample, but more extensive studies suggest that almost 60% of children aged nine to 19 had viewed online pornography and that the rate of unwitting or unwanted exposure was increasing sharply. I know that many parents will have had that sickening feeling as their child clicks through, quite innocently, to a website after searching for a particular term. For example, a search for American Girls—a series of wholesome, culturally appropriate dolls—can end up at the American Girls website, which is certainly not a wholesome place to be. It is truly shocking how easy it is to access that kind of information.

These statistics are simply red-lining a problem that every parent recognises—namely, that our children are viewing material that we would never want them to see, especially at such a young age. So what can we do about it? The current way of controlling access to pornographic material on the internet is via safety settings and filtering software, installed and maintained by users—parents, teachers and carers across the country. Unfortunately, however, through technological ignorance, time pressure or inertia or for myriad other reasons, this filtering solution is not working. Even among parents who are regular internet users, only 15% say that they know how to install a filter. It is unfortunately also the case that our children know better than we do how to circumvent the filters, while the constant changes in internet technology and content mean that they can quickly become outdated.

I would like to raise two key issues about the current, unsatisfactory situation. The first, as the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has just pointed out, is that access to pornography has a profound and negative effect on our children. Against the backdrop of a drip-feed of sexualisation that promotes pole dancing as healthy exercise for young girls and high-heeled shoes as appropriate footwear for six-month-old babies, the availability of soft-core and hard-core pornography in our homes is damaging our children.

Yesterday I attended a Safermedia conference sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), and heard compelling evidence of this damage, including the explosion in the number of children in this country being referred to addiction clinics with a “pornography problem”, and the fact that many studies demonstrate that watching internet pornography contributes to people seeing women as sex objects, increases sexual risk-taking such as having unprotected or anal sex, and relaxes the boundaries of sexual violence in a completely unacceptable way.

It is of course the ease of access to unimaginable acts of sexual violence and depravity on the internet that causes the greatest problems for parents. We all know what happens when a bit of innocent investigative clicking leads us to images that are truly sickening. Phillip Hodson of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy sums this up very appropriately when he says:

“The entire history of human perversion and sexual deviation is there at your fingertips and a great deal of it is free.”

The second problem in the current system of internet provision is the presumption that it is entirely the consumer’s responsibility to safeguard their family from harmful imagery. I am a fervent supporter of personal responsibility and have an innate dislike of Big Brother regulation, but there is a form of content delivery in this country that, in contrast to the internet, is either regulated by the Government or has a successful self-regulation model that does not appear draconian or heavy-handed. Our television viewing is restricted by sensible Ofcom guidelines, including section 1, which says that material equivalent to the British Board of Film Classification’s R18 rating must not be broadcast at any time, and that adult sex material cannot be broadcast at any time other than between 22.00 and 05.30 hours on premium subscription services or on pay-per-view or night services, which have to have mandatory restricted access, including PIN verification systems. We all accept such regulation of our television viewing quite happily.

What we see on our cinema screens is subject to regulation by the British Board of Film Classification, and we have accepted that for years. Our high street hoardings and general advertising are regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority, which displayed its teeth recently by removing posters from the Westfield shopping centre. Government guidelines inform newsagents’ displays of lad magazines and porn magazines. Even the mobile phone industry, which has arguably seen even more change than the internet in the past 10 years and whose products are increasingly used to access the internet, has introduced a reasonably successful self-regulation model that requires an adult verification check before users can access inappropriate material on the internet.