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. ‘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”. ProliferationAccording to police figures, online child sexual exploitation and abuse increased by 26 per cent between 2023 and 2024 with 51,672 recorded crimes. 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.

Source: The Guardian January 16, 2026 15:02 UTC