Adult websites should have to perform age checks before granting access says the Authority for Television On Demand (Atvod).
New research published by the watchdog has highlighted the scale of underage access to pornography online, and they have called on the government to protect children from exposure to hardcore material online.
Atvod found that one in 35 six to 11 year olds, 44,000 children, in the UK access adult material online each month, with 473,000 children aged 6 to 17 accessing the material over the same period. According to the study:
In all, one in twenty UK visitors to an adult website during that month was underage.
The scale of this issue makes it so urgent that it requires “critical the legislation is enacted during this Parliament” according to Atvod.
UK-based adult websites are already obliged to carry out age checks before granting access by asking for credit card details or personal information that can be verified. However, the vast majority of adult material online is produced and distributed by companies overseas, mostly the from the US, where Atvod has no control.
Discussing the report, Atvod chair Ruth Evans said:
“We do not advocate censorship.
There is nothing in the ATVOD Rules which interferes with the right to provide sexually explicit material to an adult online. But pornography is a product which is produced and designed for use by adults, not children. That is why the industry that makes and sells it calls itself ‘the adult industry’. There cannot be any justification for UK providers of sexually explicit pornographic material to make such images available to under 18s. The law requires that UK on demand services keep such material out of reach of minors and we are committed to ensuring that UK providers of video on demand services comply with the statutory rules. But we have no control over services that come from outside the UK.
These findings expose the scale of the problem of child access to pornography on adult websites operated from outside the UK. The Government needs to act urgently with a range of measures to protect children from this content. Key among them is legislation to make it possible for the UK payments industry to prevent funds flowing from this country to websites which allow children to access hardcore pornography.”
The statistics for the report were compiled from the online habits recorded on 45,000 desktop and laptop computers
which were monitored for a month, with the volunteers reflecting a representative cross-section of the population.
