Emily Darlington

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I want to add some actual data to our debate today. We are inundated, often online or in our inboxes, with messages about repealing the Online Safety Act. These are well-funded campaigns. There is also a lot of material online coming from very particular sources, not necessarily within the UK. Actually, 70% of people in the UK support the Online Safety Act and a similar number support age verification. Much of that has to do with what our children are seeing online. Almost 80% of people aged 18 to 21 have seen sexual violence before age 18. That is a huge number of people whose initial sexual experiences or viewing of sex involves violence. What does the Online Safety Act do? It puts porn back on the top shelf—it does not get rid of it. We are all of an age to remember when porn was on the top of the magazine rack in the corner shop. Now it is being fed to our children in their feeds. The issue is also the type and nature of porn that people are seeing online: 80% of online porn has some kind of strangulation in it. That has real-world consequences, as we have seen from the latest data on women’s health in terms of strokes. Strangulation is now the second leading cause of strokes among women in the UK. That is shocking, and it is why we needed the Online Safety Act to intervene on what was being fed to us. In Milton Keynes, 30% of young people have been approached by strangers since the implementation of the Online Safety Act. They are most frequently approached on Roblox. We do not automatically identify gaming platforms as places where people are approached by strangers, but we know from police investigations that they approach young children on Roblox and move them to end-to-end encryption sites where they can ask them to share images. In 2024, there were 7,263 online grooming offences—remember that those will just be the ones that are not in end-to-end encryption sites. There were 291,273 reports of child sexual abuse material identified last year—again, remember, that is not the material being shared on end-to-end encryption sites, because we have no idea what is actually being shared on those. Some 90% of that material is self-generated—that is, groomers asking children to take pornographic pictures of themselves and share them. Once a picture is shared with a groomer, it goes into networks and can get shared anywhere in the UK or the world. The UK is the biggest consumer of child sexual abuse images. The police reckon that 850,000 people in the UK are consuming child sexual abuse images.