“Porn is the starting point for young people when it comes to sex.”
Those are the words of a young girl in a recent report by the Children’s Commissioner about the impact of pornography upon our young people. Her words are not hyperbolic. The average age at which children first encounter pornography here in the UK is just 13. With increased access to smartphones, some children have accessed it at just 5 years old.
Not all of this is deliberate: 38% of 16-21-year-olds said they had accidentally come across pornography online, and 41% of young people have come across it on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
But its impact is far-reaching; we live in a world where almost 4 in 5 young people have seen violent pornography before the age of 18. The Children’s Commissioner’s report into the effects of pornography on young people was simply titled, ‘A lot of it is actually just abuse’.
A long journey
At CARE, we have long been concerned about the easy availability of pornography and about online safety for our children and young people; sexually explicit content - often featuring violent and misogynistic themes - is just a couple of clicks away.
For more than seven years, we campaigned for age verification on online pornography, which would require anyone who wants to watch porn to prove they are over 18. There were setbacks along the way: the Digital Economy Act in 2017 should have meant the introduction of age verification, only for the Government to abandon it in October 2019. But we refused to let the matter lie, and the introduction of the Online Safety Act, which finally passed in 2023, gave websites a finite timeline to introduce age verification. CARE has played a key role throughout this process; our work has involved multiple briefings, meetings, letters to Ministers, polling and partnerships with like-minded organisations. Our friend Simon Calvert, who is Deputy Director for Public Affairs at the Christian Institute, said: “Age verification would not have happened were it not for CARE.”
What has happened since?
The Online Safety Act, which also targets material related to self-harm, eating disorders and suicide, was fully enacted in July 2025. Since then, every pornography website has had to verify the ages of those who are viewing its content, to ensure that they are 18 or over. Methods can include verifying credit card details, mobile phone data, or other official documents.
New technologies mean that while it is not an impenetrable system, it is more effective than ever, and should stop the majority of children from stumbling across pornography online accidently. Failure to comply can lead to fines of up to £18m or 10% of annual global revenue.
The impact of its introduction was felt almost immediately: between 24 July and 8 August 2025 (i.e. in the fortnight after the Act was enacted), Pornhub — the UK’s most visited adult site — experienced a 47% fall in traffic, according to data from web analytics firm Similarweb. This translated to a drop from an average of 3.2 million daily visits in July to just 2.0 million in early August. Other major sites saw similar declines: across the same period, XVideos also saw traffic fall by 47%, and xHamster by 39%.
By October 2025, Pornhub said that its visitors from the UK were down by 77%. In January 2026, it announced that it would restrict access to its site in the UK altogether, and only people who already had an account would be able to reach it.
What next?
However, this does not mean that our work is done: the introduction of the Act has led to a spike in downloads of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which hide a user’s location, allowing them to bypass UK age verification requirements.
Last July, the government said it will not ban VPNs but acknowledged that “some people will always find a way around the law”.
Then-Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said when the measures were first introduced that it marked a “huge, giant, unprecedented step forward in stopping harmful content finding its way into children’s feeds.”
He added: “If we can take a big step forward—70, 80, maybe even 90%—when it comes to stopping harmful content getting into kids’ feeds, I’ll bank that. That’s a good day at work. That 10% that remains - we will go on figuring it out as we go forward.”
Additionally, we hope to see Ofcom, which enforces the Online Safety Act, making good on threats to fine companies which do not comply with the Act. In December 2025, it issued the biggest fine yet, saying that the AVS Group, which runs 18 adult websites, had failed to provide sufficiently robust age checks. They issued the company with a fine of £1 million, with an extra £50,000 fine for failing to respond to information requests, and AVS had 72 hours to implement adequate age verification measures or face an additional fine of £1,000 every day.
Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s online safety group director, said: “This year has seen important changes for people, with new measures across many sites and apps now better protecting children from harmful content.”
He concluded: “But we need to see much more from tech companies next year and we’ll use our full powers if they fall short.”
The battle to protect children online in the same way that they are protected offline has been long. But by God’s grace, in Oliver Griffiths’ words, “the tide on online safety” is finally starting to turn.