Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent estimate she has made of the number of children accessing online commercial pornography sites.

Preventing children from accessing harmful content such as online pornography is a priority for the government and the strongest protections in the draft Online Safety Bill are for children. The draft Bill covers many of the most visited pornography sites, social media platforms, video-sharing sites, forums and search engines - thereby capturing many of the sites through which children access pornography.

The Government recognises that a large amount of pornography is available on the internet with little or no protection to ensure that those accessing it are old enough to do so and that this is changing the way young people understand healthy relationships, sex and consent. Research published by the British Board of Film Classification in 2020, showed that the three most likely routes for children’s intentional viewing of pornography are image or video search engines (53% of children who intentionally sought out pornography have seen it here), social media sites (44% of children who intentionally sought out pornography have seen it here), and dedicated pornography sites (43% of children who intentionally sought out pornography have seen it here). While these figures only account for where children have seen pornography and not the total number or frequency of visits, it does highlight that children use a range of sources to access pornography.

My department has also commissioned research recently to develop the evidence base on the prevalence and impact of harmful content online to children, which includes online pornography.