UK's Tories Promise To Enact Age Limits For Viewing Online Porn

An anonymous reader writes with this news from the UK: The Conservatives say they will force hardcore pornography websites to put in place age-restriction controls or face being shut down if they win the election. The culture secretary, Sajid Javid, said the party would act to ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content after a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images. Experts welcomed the move – targeted at both UK-based and overseas websites – but warned it would take hard work to implement in practice.

Comments

And where are the parents?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

...a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images...

In other news, around 10% of parents apparently have no idea how to supervise their 12-13 year old children when they go on-line. Maybe we should treat the problem, not one particular symptom? Age-checks on porn sites aren't going to stop those same inadequately supervised children from being groomed for other things, or subject to hate attacks by classmates at school, or any number of other threats that come with an open communication system like the Internet.

Re:And where are the parents?

[SuricouRaven]

Childline is run by the NSPCC. The NSPCC has something of a history of abusing statistics and using poor survey methodology to generate scary statistics.

Here's a BBC article on their survey: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/educ...

I can't find anything yet that describes exactly how the survey was carried out - mostly I find columns expressing shock at the claimed numbers - but I wouldn't trust the findings too much without checking where they come from.