Just under a month since the Online Safety Act’s new age verification rules came into place, the number of people accessing pornography in the UK has decreased sharply.
Pornhub, the UK’s most visited adult content website, experienced a 47 per cent drop in traffic from July 24 (the day before the new rules were actioned) to August 8, according to data experts at Similarweb, with other adult sites also reporting decreases in traffic.
But whether the numbers are indicative of progress depends on who you ask.
While some say that the new rules will prevent young people from watching harmful content, such as strangulation and rape, others fear what it means for privacy and caution that increased regulation will further stigmatise pornography, pushing adolescents to darker parts of the internet.
Do age verification rules work?
Before July 25, anyone could press a button to confirm that they were over 18 to access pornography. The new regulation requires people to submit a photo of their ID, credit card details or a photo of themselves in order to enter certain adult sites.
But while traffic to adult sites is down, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t still finding ways to access pornography.
Anna Alexander, co-founder and director of Split Banana, an organisation that delivers inclusive sex and relationships education across the country, says that she’s already heard reports of young people using Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps to access porn.
Young people “are more tech savvy than people who are older than them and they can access VPNs fairly easy,” Alexander tells The Standard.
VPNs hide your online location, which makes it harder for websites to collect data on where users are. In the days following the age verification rules, VPN apps became the most downloaded on Apple’s App Store in the UK. One app maker told the BBC that it had experienced a 1,800% spike in downloads.
As well as this, under-13s are often exposed to porn via explicit GIFs or people sharing imagery in a WhatsApp group. “All of that can still happen even with these age verifications,” Alexander says.
“Making porn harder to access won’t stop young people from finding it—it will just leave them unprepared,” Erika Lust, feminist porn director, tells The Standard.
Lust has created a non-profit called The Porn Conversation that offers tools for parents and educators to support healthier sexual relationships.
“The real issue is not stopping [young people] from seeing [porn], but helping them understand what they see—through dialogue, education, and open conversations about body image, consent, and desire.”
What does porn teach us?
According to research from Lovehoney, nearly a quarter of men say they learn the most about sex from pornography. Without access to porn, many men will lose this roadmap for intimacy. But is this a bad thing?
Dr. Anand Patel, a GP who is working with Lovehoney on a ‘Menifesto’ campaign to encourage men to speak candidly about sex, says using porn as sex education is like watching a “James Bond film to learn how to drive”.
While porn can “open people’s eyes to the variety of sex that’s available”, including LGBTQ+ sex in countries where it is illegal, the majority of online porn portrays a limited depiction of sex.
As Lorraine Grover, psychosexual nurse specialist, points out, even though porn can help LGBTQ+ youths “explore desire and identity,” it doesn’t necessarily teach them “about healthy intimacy, consent and safety”.
What’s more, most porn on the internet is created by men and reinforces male-centric, heterenormative ideas about what sex and bodies should look like. Dr. Patel says he has seen numerous patients who are insecure about their genitalia, with a distorted idea of what is ‘normal’, which can have damaging consequences.
“If you feel insecure, either you're going to take that into your relationship and feel like you want to prove your masculinity in another way, or you're going to step back from relationships and think I'm not worthy,” he says.
Will the new rules change anything?
Across the board, experts agree that bans alone will not be enough to improve the mental health and sexual behaviours of young people in the UK.
“Forcing users to hand over IDs to access adult content is risky in a world where porn is still heavily stigmatised and data handling is inconsistent, leaving even legal viewers vulnerable,” Izabela Bartyzel, founder of RedCheeks, an organization that runs intimacy coordination workshops, told The Standard.
“What I believe would actually help is stronger media literacy, including adult content, for both young people and adults, alongside sex education that goes far beyond pregnancy and STIs.”
“Laws built on fear rarely create safety,” she says, “Fear tends to close the conversations down, not open them up.”
