What Hong Kong can learn from Britain in protecting children from online porn
- Exposure to online porn, especially unwittingly through social media, is having a negative effect on children and young people
- Britain’s Online Safety Bill is pushing for tougher laws yet Hong Kong’s cybercrime subcommittee did not even include online pornography in its preliminary report
In January this year, the children’s commissioner for England and Wales, Rachel de Souza, reported that young people were frequently exposed to violent pornography, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sexual activities, with many having encountered violent pornography before their 18th birthday.
She also revealed that those who used pornography frequently were the most likely to indulge in physically aggressive sexual behaviour. Pornography was far from confined to adult sites, she disclosed, with Twitter the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen it.
In March, Dignify, a sexual abuse charity, reported that, of the 4,000 children aged between 14 and 18 it surveyed, 22 per cent had viewed pornography on multiple occasions, with one in five admitting to having a porn habit, and one in 10 feeling addicted. One head teacher called the impact of violent pornography on her pupils severe, with her school using specialised training techniques to respond to a big increase in sexual abuse cases.
As Dignify’s CEO, Helen Roberts, acknowledges, it is “impossible to tackle the embedded behaviours of sexual harassment [in schools] without talking about the harmful impact pornography is having on children and young people”.
In the House of Lords, Baroness Anne Jenkin is campaigning for tougher child protection laws and, by using mandatory age certificates, she wants to stop videos being viewed by children on their mobile phones, which she calls “porn in your pocket”.
Whereas pornography causes the objectification of girls, Jenkin considers that videos depicting extreme violence, including strangulation and sodomy, are behind a rise in body dysmorphia. The number of girls feeling uncomfortable in their bodies is increasing, with teenagers being pressured into activities they “absolutely do not enjoy”.
Although the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) classifies pornography for distribution and is legally required to consider potential harm, there is no equivalent protection on the internet.
The Online Safety Bill is currently before parliament, and it recognises that the regulation of pornography needs to be consistent between the online and offline spheres, with on-demand pornography platforms facing the same offline standards. It requires legal pornography sites to ensure that children cannot access them, while also protecting them from pornography on social media sites and search engines.
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Jenkin and her fellow campaigners are, moreover, seeking to strengthen the bill by ensuring that mandatory age-verification techniques are accurate, and they have tabled amendments to ensure that systems do not just estimate age, but identify it to the day. To close possible loopholes, they also want stringent controls covering all pornography, extreme or moderate, wherever found.
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Of those who watched pornography while aged 10 to 19, almost 30 per cent of those surveyed had at least once desired to have sexual contact with children or teenagers, and about 11 per cent admitted to having taking action to enact their urges. Some respondents frankly admitted associating sexual activity with violence.
Grenville Cross SC is honorary consultant to the Child Protection Institute of Against Child Abuse
