by Lucy Marsh, Family Education Trust
| The Children’s Commissioner’s new report, “Sex is kind of broken now”: children and pornography, is one of the bleakest snapshots of childhood I have read in years. It shows that exposure to porn has become both common and earlier, with the content increasingly violent and degrading. This was the landscape just before Ofcom’s children’s safety rules under the Online Safety Act took effect, and Dame Rachel de Souza’s will be a baseline by which we judge whether the new framework is working. The top‑line numbers should trouble every parent: 70% of young people surveyed say they saw pornography before turning 18, up from 64% two years ago. The average first exposure is to porn is age 13, with more than a quarter exposed to it by just 11. Most did not go looking for it — more than half say they encountered porn by accident, and the proportion seeing it accidentally has jumped sharply since 2023. A chart on page 19 identifies X, formerly Twitter, as the single biggest source of adult content, outstripping dedicated porn sites and widening the gap since 2023. Eight of the top ten sources of porn are mainstream social media or messaging platforms including SnapChat. The fact that porn videos can randomly pop up on a child’s social media account, even if parents have installed strict controls blocking access to 18+ content should ring alarm bells. The porn actress Bonnie Blue (who was recently banned from OnlyFans because its payment providers balked at her ‘extreme challenges’) admitted in the recent Channel 4 documentary that she creates hundreds of profiles to share her content on ALL social media platforms. As soon as one account is reported and banned, her team creates another to ensure that her explicit content reaches millions of user’s algorithms. For social media regulators, this must feel like the game Whack-A-Mole. Indeed, while writing my recent article about the documentary, just searching for her name online brought up unwanted videos of Bonnie Blue on my own Facebook and Instagram pages. These images may be unsettling for adults, so it’s even more important to consider their potential impact on children who encounter them unexpectedly. The content that children are being unwittingly exposed to is frightening. Table 2 on page 26 records that 58% had seen strangulation depicted, 57% step‑relations scenarios, and 44% sex with a sleeping person, which in real-life would be classed as rape. Yet Table 3 on page 27 shows that very few children purposely searched for such acts. The violent material is pushed to children by design choices and algorithms they do not control. This is a terrible safety risk to children which Big Tech companies must stop. They have the power to do so — will our Government hold them accountable? Attitudes to sex are changing The report also connects exposure with attitudes. On page 32, 44% agreed that “girls may say no at first but then can be persuaded to have sex”, with higher agreement among those who had seen pornography. Whatever else we debate about how young people use the internet, most people would agree that it is not healthy for boys and girls to grow up thinking such attitudes to sex are healthy. This is especially important considering that in Pornhub’s statistics of the most searched word on its site by men is ‘teen’. Sexualised children are more likely to become victims of predatory adults looking to abuse them and display harmful sexual behaviour as adults. Parliament has at least begun to act. Porn providers must now implement “Highly Effective Age Assurance” to stop under‑18s accessing their services under Part 5 of the Online Safety Act, with Ofcom’s detailed guidance published in January and enforcement already under way. Social media and search services must also implement the Children’s Safety Codes to reduce children’s exposure to harmful content. These duties are now live, with Ofcom stating that, from 25 July 2025, providers must adopt the Code measures or equally effective alternatives. The regulator says it stands ready to enforce. The new age verification rules have already made a difference, with Pornhub (the UK’s most visited adult website) reporting a 47 per cent drop in user traffic from July 24 (the day before the new rules were actioned) to August 8. The number of average daily visits to Pornhub fell from 3.2 million in July to 2 million in the first nine days of August. However, the data also showed that some smaller and less regulated pornography sites saw visits increase. More than 50 adult websites have failed to implement effective age-verification checks, meaning their content is still available to children. Some good news is that policy is beginning to catch up to act on the most violent porn genres, given the rising violence against women and girls. The Government has announced that depictions of strangulation in pornography will be made illegal, closing an obvious gap between online and offline standards. That change should be implemented comprehensively and quickly. We also need to be honest about circumvention. The report notes that Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which can disguise your location online, allowing people to use the internet as though they were in another country, were promoted immediately as a workaround to age checks. VPNS became the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store in the UK in the days after the age verification rules were enforced. Ofcom’s guidance requires robust systems, but Government will likely need to consider proportionate steps so that a British user on a UK device cannot simply toggle jurisdiction to evade UK child‑protection law. Schools and parents need better support too. Ofcom’s new Children’s Passive Online Measurement study underlines just how central the big social apps are to children’s daily lives. That is the pipe through which much of this material flows, often unsolicited. Meanwhile the Department for Education has issued revised statutory RSHE guidance to take effect from September 2026. Schools will need help, training and a confident policy spine to deliver it well. Here is where I want to push further than the Commissioner — sex education must never normalise pornography, nor should it sideline the family. In law, schools must teach “the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and the bringing up of children”. That is not a culture‑war slogan — it is Section 403 of the Education Act 1996. I think we should say so clearly in RSHE: marriage between a man and a woman is a social good that offers children, on average, the most stable setting in which to be raised. This can be taught with kindness and without disparaging anyone. It is the confident statement of a positive norm the state itself recognises. We should also be careful about the claim that more explicit sex education will automatically reduce harm. There is serious evidence that broad, mandated sex‑education laws can correlate with higher teen pregnancy, and that large‑scale expansions of contraceptive initiatives show limited effects on conception. A major Cochrane review concluded that education‑only programmes did not reduce biological outcomes such as STIs or pregnancy. None of that means education is pointless, but it does mean we should avoid ever more graphic curricula for ever younger children and put more emphasis on parental formation, character, self‑control, and a supportive school ethos that esteems commitment, chastity and marriage. The report is also right to flag the rapidly evolving problem of AI‑generated sexual content, including deepfake and nudified images. The Internet Watch Foundation warns that full‑length synthetic abuse films are now foreseeable without urgent action. Indeed, Pornhub’s most searched-for term worldwide in 2025 was ‘hentai’, which is a perverse Japanese-style animation featuring scenes such as gang rape and fantasy-style sexual scenes. Ofcom’s regime will have to keep pace with this development, and criminal law will need the tools to address creation and distribution at source. |
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