The Church of England General Synod has voted in favour of a motion to urge the Government to bring in age verification for access to online pornography.
The Synod, the national assembly of the Church of England, voted almost unanimously on the motion, with 263 members voting for the move, only two voting against, and three abstaining.
The motion included three elements; that the Synod acknowledges that children and young people are suffering “grave harm” from online pornography, to recommend more social and educational programmes to raise awareness of the harms of pornography, and to ask the Government to secure the passage of legislation requiring age verification for access to online pornography.
The Rev Jo Winn-Smith, who brought the motion, said age verification “ought to be a no brainer”. She said: “The internet has capacity for great good; inspiring the imagination, knowledge sharing, and friendship building. Yet it is also a place where the darker side of life is prevalent. The Government is playing catch-up at present and pressure needs to maintained on them to ensure these protections are enacted.”
In April, proposals for an Online Safety Bill, which will require pornography websites to use age verification technology to stop children from accessing the material on their sites, cleared their first Commons hurdle, with MPs giving the Bill an unopposed second reading. It will undergo further scrutiny at a later stage, with amendments tabled for consideration. The legislation is expected to force the biggest operators such as Facebook and Google, to abide by a duty of care to users, overseen by Ofcom as the new regulator for the sector.
Ms Winn-Smith argued that experts had shown that online pornography was “increasingly extreme and violent, misogynistic, objectifying women, normalising non-consent and coercion, as well as promoting unrealistic attitudes towards sex and body image”.
Father Stephen Maxwell, a Greek Orthodox priest, urged the Synod to “fight this devil in our midst”. He said that 30 years ago he seldom heard a confession about pornography and now it made up most of the confessions. “This is a disaster," he said. "It is a disaster not just for children, it is a disaster for middle aged people, even old aged people.”
The Rev Fiona Jack, said her market research business had conducted research on behalf of a well-known search engine and video platform company on the topic of age verification. She said age verification was “very, very important” but that people must “think very carefully about how we do this”.
She said some methods of establishing age verification were "very, very intrusive", including the use of biometric data. "Basically, you can tell people’s age from their facial features and the way they look, their appearance and so on. I find these personally to be very, very intrusive and so I wholeheartedly support this motion but I think more thought is needed about the extent of it.
"It's not just pornography, it's violence and horror as well that was also mentioned, and we need to think very thoroughly and carefully about how age verification is done.”
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