Today the Crime and Policing Bill returns to Parliament, with a number of amendments due for debate that aim to tackle some of the most harmful risks children are facing online today.
Some of these are directly related to my own work on the scale and severity of emerging threats online: regulating violent pornography and banning nudification tools.
The evidence is clear – children are exposed to serious harms online long before they turn 18. The tabled amendments in the Crime and Policing Bill represent long overdue steps in closing the loopholes to protect children online.
I’m urging Peers to back these amendments today.
Pornography
Unregulated online pornography remains one of the most serious threats to childhood. My research has found that exposure to pornography before the age of 18 has become normal: 70% of young people I surveyed had seen it before the legal age.
More concerning still, much of this pornography is violent and degrading – shaping attitudes towards sex, relationships, women and girls, and even themselves. In my report “Sex is kind of broken now”: children and pornography young people described routinely encountering depictions of strangulation, sex where one participant was asleep – which is a non-consensual act and therefore an illegal depiction of rape, step-relation sex, and someone being gagged or choked during oral sex. The average age children first see pornography is just 13.
That’s why I welcome the amendment to introduce the recommendations in Baroness Bertin’s Independent Review of Pornography to bring parity between the regulation of online and offline pornography. This is long overdue. It is staggering that DVDs and offline publications that are far less accessible to children are subject to more rigorous checks than online pornography, which is accessible after just a few clicks, on most platforms. Extending the scope of the British Board of Film Classification’s (BBFC) regulatory powers to online providers is essential – and something I have called for to protect children whose lives exist equally online as offline.
Another measures due for debate today is on a ban on depictions of strangulation in pornography, following my findings showing more than half (58%) of young people had seen this – yet just 6% sought it out.
Further amendments would prohibit depictions of incest, ban adult performers from portraying children – a reference to the ‘nearly legal’ genre of content, and require age and consent checks for pornography performers. These amendments, if added to the Crime and Policing Bill will begin to tackle what I believe is the normalisation of child sexual abuse in online pornography. We cannot allow the legal circulation and consumption of pornography that depicts sexual acts in scenes that suggest participants are children.
Nudification tools
In the time it has taken regulators and government to get a handle on the risks from social media and pornography via the Online Safety Act, a new threat has arrived: Artificial Intelligence (AI).
By itself, AI is not by itself a threat. In fact, it can be used creatively or in business to great effect and purpose, providing real advantages to young people or professionals alike.
But with this evolution in tech, it has supercharged every known harm, providing predators with new tools to generate child sexual abuse material, flooding social media platforms with deceptive content, and creating whole new forms of abuse that existing laws never anticipated.
Earlier this year my research on nudification tools, “One day this could happen to me”: children, nudification tools and sexually explicit deepfake images, demonstrated the profound fear and anxiety these tools created. Children did not need to be victims to feel fear or to put in place protective measures to try and keep themselves safe, leading some young people withdrawing from online life altogether. Some girls told me they preferred to stay off the internet entirely than risk being the subject of a faked nude image – meaning they are missing out on all the positives of the online world as a way to avoid the bad.
So I am hugely supportive of Baroness Bertin’s amendment to ban nudification software outright. The very existence of these tools is an act of violence against women and girls, because the vast majority are trained to work on female bodies. The intention is to target women and girls, incite fear, and there is no good reason for their existence.
The government must ban them outright.
AI services – those not created for the purposes of faking nude images – should be held to the same standard as any other online platform, so I also support Baroness Kidron’s amendment that would make sure Generative AI services are properly brought within the Illegal Content Code and the Children’s Code, to set out how they must fulfil their obligations to protecting children from harmful content.
Moving forward
Through the Crime and Policing Bill, we have a critical opportunity to solidify the protections we have worked so hard to introduce online for children, who do not distinguish between their lives online versus offline. For too long, children have navigated an online world where violent pornography, AI-generated sexual imagery and dangerous AI advice are only a matter of a few clicks away.
These amendments are not merely technical fixes; they give us the chance to reset our duty to protect children in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. We must act to protect children today and into the future.
