Internet Pornography

George Hollingbery Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[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circumvent the filters, while the constant changes in internet technology and content mean that they can quickly become outdated.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.

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

Carphone Warehouse is conducting a campaign on this issue, working with Professor Tanya Byron who has been working with the Government in this area for three or four years. A survey conducted by Carphone Warehouse found that 85% of children did not have parental controls activated on their mobile phones, 81% of parents felt that they needed to know more about how to deal with this problem, and 48% of parents wrongly thought that it was impossible for their child to download adult content on their mobile phone. I welcome the efforts being made by the mobile phone companies—there is no doubt that they have tried hard—but does my hon. Friend agree that there is still a great deal more to be done?

[Claire Perry]

As always, my hon. Friend makes an excellent, fact-filled point. I agree that although the self-regulation model is better than the one that pertains for internet service providers, there is much more to be done.

Why should internet service providers be any different from other content providers? Why is the onus on parents, teachers and carers to act as web guides and policemen? Where is the industry responsibility?

Three objections are usually raised when changes such as I am proposing tonight are discussed. The first is that any restriction on access to pornography on the internet is an infringement of free speech. I hope I am no Mary Whitehouse figure, although she was right about many things, but the nature of the internet has led to a proliferation of imagery and a discussion of sexual practices which is quite mind-boggling in its awfulness. I will not read out some of the information that was provided at the Safer Media conference yesterday, but I, at the age of 46, was introduced to sexual practices—one or two clicks away—that I have never heard of and simply cannot conceive of having my daughters view. It was simply sickening.

It is simply beyond belief that people can find sexual pleasure in viewing images of children, men and women being subject to the worst sexual degradation and violence. If that is our definition of free speech, the definition is wrong. That is not the purpose of tonight’s debate, however. I do not propose to reduce or restrict inappropriate content for adults who access the internet; I would simply like to make it more difficult for our children to access that material.

The second objection to my proposal is that it is too costly and too difficult to implement—that it is a regulatory burden on a struggling industry. That is a red herring. Although the content of the internet is generated out there in the wild west on millions of international websites, access is concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies. The Digital Economy Act 2010 states that there are 450 fixed internet providers in the UK, but that the top six, which include household names such as BT, Virgin, TalkTalk, BSkyB, Orange and O2, have more than 90% of the market share. That is not a large group of companies to deal with and regulate. Notably, the combined revenues of that business model are more than £3 billion a year, so it is a deeply profitable industry in which to engage.

Another concern is the definition of pornography. If we are to have an age-verification system, how do we define pornography? We already have perfectly workable definitions of adult content provided by the Obscene Publications Act 1959, and provided and used by Ofcom in the television industry. The required blocking technology is available in distributed form, with the onus on parents and users to implement it, but one does not need to be Bill Gates to pull the whole thing into a more sensible system of internet regulation.

Interestingly, although the official view of the Internet Service Providers Association—confusingly named ISPA—is that any official restrictions would be hugely expensive, technically difficult and open to circumvention, one provider, TalkTalk, proposes to provide a ratings system in the new year, with an opt-in system including U, 14, 18 or unclassified ratings similar to those of the British Board of Film Classification. Although that is a responsible and welcome step which I commend, it is a voluntary system, again with the onus on parents to sign up. Surely it would be better for TalkTalk to offer a default U setting and then allow an opt-in to more advanced levels.