Diane Robertson
To protect children in the UK, Prime Minister, David Cameron announced Monday that households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it. The Prime Minister warned that he would “force action” by changing the law if he must. Along with the change in internet service, pornography portraying rape will be illegal in England and Wales.
Cameron declared:
“I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children, how online pornography is corroding childhood. And how, in the darkest corners of the internet, there are things going on that are a direct danger to our children, and that must be stamped out. I’m not making this speech because I want to moralise or scaremonger, but because I feel profoundly as a politician, and as a father, that the time for action has come. This is, quite simply, about how we protect our children and their innocence.”
All existing internet customers will be asked if they want the family friendly filter. Those who do not answer will automatically receive it. New customers will be asked if they want the filter when they sign up for internet services. All ISP providers have rewired their system to connect all household devices that connect to the internet to the filter rather than having to set filters up on each device.
Additional measures include:
- New laws so videos streamed online in the UK will be subject to the same restrictions as those sold in shops.
- Search engines having until October to introduce further measures to block illegal content.
- Experts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre being given more powers to examine secretive file-sharing networks.
- A secure database of banned child pornography images gathered by police across the country will be used to trace illegal content and the pedophiles viewing it.
While this new policy will help protect children in the UK from accidentally clicking onto pornography websites, parents will still need to monitor children’s use of the internet. Good filters typically have the capacity to filter out 90% of pornographic websites. Social media sites will not be filtered and children and teens have become the victims of sex crimes and cyber stalking through social media sites. It is always good policy to know what your children are viewing and reading and who they are speaking to either online or in person.