Children’s Commissioner: Urgent Action Needed to Protect Children from Online Pornography 

Children’s Commissioner: Urgent Action Needed to Protect Children from Online Pornography 

Published: 18 August 2025 

The Children’s Commissioner has released one of her most hard-hitting reports to date, exposing the scale of children’s exposure to harmful online pornography. 

Titled “Sex is kind of broken now”: children and pornography, the report warns that children are stumbling across violent and degrading sexual material at shockingly young ages – often in primary school – through mainstream social media platforms. 

The Commissioner describes the findings as “a snapshot of what rock bottom looks like”, noting that harmful content is frequently pushed to children by platform design, algorithms, and disappearing-image features, rather than being actively searched for. 

Key findings and messages include: 

• Children are increasingly encountering porn accidentally, often years before they are old enough to understand what they are seeing. 

• Content is frequently violent, extreme, and degrading – sometimes showing acts that are illegal. 

• Nearly half of young people surveyed agreed with the harmful belief that “girls may say no at first but then can be persuaded to have sex”, raising concerns about links between online exposure and real-world attitudes towards women and girls. 

• The Commissioner stresses that no child should ever be exposed to pornography online – calling this “the bare minimum we should expect”. 

The report comes just weeks after the Online Safety Act came into force (25 July), introducing new protections for children. The Commissioner’s Office is working with Ofcom to ensure these protections are robust and enforced, warning there must be serious consequences for companies that fail to meet expectations. 

“This must be a line in the sand,” the Commissioner said. “Children’s safety online is not optional. A society is judged by how it protects its children. Let us be judged well.” 

“Sex is kind of broken now”: children and pornography | Children’s Commissioner for England