Charlotte Sexton
BBC Newsnight
Getty Images
The government needs to stop children using virtual private networks (VPNs) to bypass age checks on porn sites, the children’s commissioner for England has said.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “absolutely a loophole that needs closing” and called for age verification on VPNs.
VPNs can disguise your location online – allowing you to use the internet as though you are in another country. It means that they can be used to bypass requirements of the Online Safety Act, which mandated platforms with certain adult content to start checking the age of users.
A government spokesperson said VPNs are legal tools for adults and there are no plans to ban them.
The children’s commissioner’s recommendation is included in a new report, which found the proportion of children saying they have seen pornography online has risen in the past two years.
Last month VPNs were the most downloaded apps on Apple’s App Store in the UK after sites such as PornHub, Reddit and X began requiring age verification.
Virtual private networks connect users to websites using a remote server and conceal their actual IP address and location, meaning they can circumvent blocks on particular sites or content.
Dame Rachel 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.”
She wants ministers to explore requiring VPNs “to implement highly effective age assurances to stop underage users from accessing pornography.”
The report also found more children are stumbling across pornography accidentally, with some of the 16 to 21-year-olds surveyed saying they had viewed it “aged six or younger”.
More than half of respondents to the survey had viewed strangulation as children, prompting Dame Rachel to also ask the government to ban depictions of it.
Pornography depicting rape of a sleeping person was also seen by 44% of respondents as children.
The data was gathered prior to the amendments to the Online Safety Act in July, which brought in age verification tools for pornography.
Dame Rachel described the findings as “rock bottom”.
“This tells us how much of the problem is about the design of platforms, algorithms and recommendation systems that put harmful content in front of children who never sought it out,” the commissioner said, calling for the report to act as a “line in the sand”.
The Department of Science, Innovation and Technology told the BBC “children have been left to grow up in a lawless online world for too long” and “the Online Safety Act is changing that’.
On Dame Rachel’s VPN comments, the spokesperson said there are no plans to ban them “but if platforms deliberately push workarounds like VPNs to children, they face tough enforcement and heavy fines.”
Josh Lane was addicted to porn by 14-years-old after first finding it via a Google search when he was aged 12.
He told Newsnight the addiction caused him to isolate himself from friends and family because he was “afraid of anyone discovering that I was hooked.”
Mr Lane described finding “the only place I could get, I guess, love and intimacy was from pornography” at the same time as feeling “heaps of guilt and shame”
Now 25 and happily married, he has not looked at porn in almost a year but said the addiction is “a problem that affects you forever”.
Kerry Smith, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, said “children’s exposure to extreme or violent sexual imagery can normalise harmful sexual behaviours, and is increasingly linked to sexual violence against girls and women”.
She added: “It is clear this is something we all need to be taking seriously, and the safeguards adult sites have put in place to make sure children can’t access sexual content must be robust and meaningful.”
