NCWGB has campaigned for many years for children to be protected from online pornography.  The UK online safety bill was finally passed by Parliament in September 2023. The new act will include:

Children

• A requirement to pro-actively remove illegal material relating to child exploitation and abuse.

• Stricter requirements for online providers to proactively prevent under-18s:

o seeing harmful and age-inappropriate material such as content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm and eating disorders;

o accessing pornography or violence;

o bullying.

• Explicit requirements for online providers to impose age verification and age estimation measures

and ensure those measures are effective in preventing children from accessing pornography.

 

Women and girls

The amended Bill also includes measures to tackle violence and abuse against women and girls. It:

• Creates new offences of intentionally sharing, or threatening to share, intimate images without consent. Intimate image abuse survivors will have greater protections, including lifetime anonymity and automatic eligibility for special measures in court, such as giving evidence via video or behind a screen.

• Criminalises the sharing of ‘deepfakes’ ie. explicit images or videos that have been digitally altered to look like someone else.

• Introduces harsher penalties for revenge porn.

• Makes cyberflashing illegal. Upskirting and downblousing already are.

• Lists coercive control – a common form of domestic abuse – as a ‘priority’ offence. Tech companies will need to prevent and remove such content from their sites.

• Tackles prolific online scams such as romance fraud, which sees people (often women) manipulated into sending money to fake identities on dating apps.

• Gives women more power to decide who can communicate with them and what people can see. Social media companies will have to improve the way women can report abuse and the responses they receive.