Commissioner: Close loophole allowing children to access online pornography
VPNs can allow users to disguise their location online and Dame Rachel de Souza, in a new report published this week, has said the Government must ensure children are not able to use these tools to avoid the age-check process.
The Government has previously said that while VPNs are legal in the UK for adults, under the Online Safety Act, platforms have a 'clear responsibility to prevent children from bypassing safety protections', including blocking content that promotes VPNs or other workarounds specifically aimed at young users.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight: 'Of course, we need age verification on VPNs – it's absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that's one of my major recommendations.'
A Government spokesperson said: 'Children have been left to grow up in a lawless online world for too long, bombarded with pornography and harmful content that can scar them for life.
'The Online Safety Act is changing that. Let's be clear: VPNs are legal tools for adults and there are no plans to ban them. But if platforms deliberately push workarounds like VPNs to children, they face tough enforcement and heavy fines. We will not allow corporate interests to come before child safety.
'This is about drawing a line – no more excuses, no more loopholes. Protecting children online must come first.'
Dame Rachel's latest report on the issue of online pornography and young people's access to it found that the proportion of children saying they have seen pornography online has risen in the past two years, with most likely to have stumbled upon it accidentally.
Dame Rachel said her research is evidence that harmful content is being presented to children through dangerous algorithms, rather than them seeking it out.
She described the content young people are seeing as 'violent, extreme and degrading' and often illegal, and said her office's findings must be seen as a 'snapshot of what rock bottom looks like'.
The report, a follow-on from research by the Children's Commissioner's office in 2023, found a higher proportion (70%) of people saying they had seen online pornography before turning 18, up from 64% of respondents two years ago.
The other recommendations in her report included that online pornography should be audited to ensure it meets the same content requirements as offline pornography; the depiction of non-fatal strangulation must be 'outlawed comprehensively'; and there should be a recruitment drive for specialist RHSE (Relationships, Health and Sex Education) teachers and support for teachers to deliver the curriculum.
The research for her report was done in May, ahead of new online safety measures coming into effect last month, including age checks aimed at preventing children from accessing pornography and other harmful content.
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