Legislative amendments allowing violent pornography online raise serious concerns

UK government amendments to a bill which would make certain forms of violent and illegal pornography acceptable online so long as they are placed behind age-verification checks have raised serious concerns.

MPs will vote tomorrow on proposed changes to the Digital Economy Bill – changes that would mean most material which is prohibited for DVDs and video on demand services would be allowed online including the portrayal of violence and computer generated or animated images of child sexual abuse.

Before the changes were made in the House of Lords, the new regulator, the British Board of Film Classification, could take action to prevent access to any site showing material that would not be allowed to be provided on DVD – now it can only do so in relation to a narrow selection of that material.

Charity CARE commissioned some polling recently about these changes and discovered that the vast majority of people surveyed want to see strong regulation of violent pornography online, equal or stronger to the rules applied offline.

Mary Sharpe, CEO of The Reward Foundation and a former advocate, told Scottish Legal News: “Parents need all the help they can get to protect their children from the relentless stream of violent pornography available on every smartphone. Images that are illegal offline should not be legal online just because they are behind an age verification barrier.

“The Reward Foundation hopes that Parliament will give the regulator real powers to address the problems in a rounded way. However all these measures have to supported with education about the harms so that children can make better decisions about how pornography can affect them.”