The Government has been urged to ban online pornography glorifying or promoting child sex abuse.
In a Committee Stage debate on the Crime and Policing Bill in December, Peers called on the Government to clamp down on extreme online sexual content depicting children.
Amendments to the Bill tabled by Conservative Peer Baroness Bertin, to end what was described as an “indefensible” stain on our society, received support from across the chamber.
‘Demonstrable harm’
Lady Bertin said her proposals sought “to close the gap between the law governing offline and online pornography” and warned that online pornography “is now so extreme and pervasive that it does not just reflect sexual tastes; it shapes them”.
She explained that her amendments would: make it illegal “for an adult to mimic a child in pornographic content”; ban incest porn; require platforms to ensure all images and videos featured over-18s; and “create a new offence of producing or sharing material that advocates or glorifies child sexual abuse”.
The proposals, she continued, “aim to regulate an industry that has evaded scrutiny and is causing demonstrable harm: normalising violence, sexualising children and enabling abuse”, adding: “The law must evolve to meet these challenges and put proportionate guardrails back in place.”
Shared objectives
Lib Dem Peer Baroness Floella Benjamin welcomed the amendments, calling them “reasonable, evidence-based and urgently needed”.
Labour’s Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws pleaded with the Government “to listen to these submissions; they are made because of the real detriment to our society and quality of life that is created by virtue of this stuff”.
And crossbencher Lord Carter of Haslemere said the disparity in the current situation “makes a mockery of regulation in the offline sector, since anyone can circumvent it by watching material online that is banned offline”.
Justice Minister Baroness Levitt responded that the Government would not be supporting Lady Bertin’s amendments, but recognised her tireless work seeking to raise “awareness of the ways pornography shapes sexual behaviour” and pledged to work with her “in the coming weeks”.
Proliferation
According to police figures, online child sexual exploitation and abuse increased by 26 per cent between 2023 and 2024 with 51,672 recorded crimes.
Becky Riggs, Acting Chief Constable at Staffordshire Police and National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Child Protection and Abuse Investigation, called on social media platforms to utilise existing technology to “prevent these harms from occurring”.
Last year, the Internet Watch Foundation reported a proliferation of AI-generated videos depicting child sexual abuse and a fourfold rise in confirmed reports of AI-generated sexualised images of children in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024.
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