Latest news with #GabbyBertin
Indian Express
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
‘You can't believe how bad it is': UK peer demands ‘Minister for Porn' to regulate online content
Baroness Gabby Bertin knew the images would be disturbing. But she also knew it was necessary. During a recent meeting with Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, she presented a selection of extreme pornographic screenshots that have become all too accessible to British children. One image in particular showed a grown man grabbing a young girl's throat. 'They were screengrabs showing little girls… and massive, grown men grabbing little girls' throats,' Bertin said, as per The Guardian. 'Unless you see it, you can't believe how bad it is.' Kyle, appearing shocked and upset, turned away. This, Bertin says, is the reaction she often gets. But turning away, she argues, won't solve anything. Since December 2023, the Conservative peer has been leading an independent review of online pornography—commissioned by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—and has emerged as one of the most vocal figures demanding urgent regulation of what children can see online. In February, Bertin released her report, recommending 32 actions to address the deluge of violent and degrading content online. Among them: a ban on strangulation in pornographic content, which the government has now accepted. But she wants more than policy tweaks—she wants a structural shift. The government needs to appoint a minister for porn, she recommends. 'You can't leave the pitch on this stuff… because you're worried about being accused of being too strait-laced.' Her call has resonated with others, including Labour MPs. Despite political differences, there's growing consensus that the internet cannot remain a lawless domain when it comes to harmful sexual content. Under current British law, pornography shown in cinemas or sold on DVD faces strict content rules. Online platforms, however, remain loosely governed. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) recently urged the government to extend its monitoring role to include online platforms. Though Ofcom has secured commitments from several adult websites to improve age verification under the Online Safety Act, serious concerns remain about content that promotes abuse, degradation, and misogyny. Bertin makes it clear that her concern is not about policing adult sexual freedom. 'Consenting adults should be able to do what they want. But restricting people from seeing a woman being choked, called a whore, and having several men stamp on her… is not ending someone's sexual freedom.' (With inputs from The Guardian, The Independent)
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Unless you see it, you can't believe how bad it is': the peer demanding a minister for porn
When the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin arrived for a meeting with the the science and technology secretary, Peter Kyle, earlier this year she startled him by laying out an array of pornographic images across his desk. 'They were screengrabs showing little girls, their hair in bunches, and massive, grown men grabbing little girls' throats,' she says. She had selected images which appeared to depict child abuse, and yet were easily and legally available on a popular website. 'Unless you see it, you can't quite believe how bad it is.' The minister appeared shocked and upset by the images, she recalls, so she quickly tidied them away and later shredded them. Bertin has noticed that her desire to talk frequently and openly about extreme pornography is not shared by all her Westminster colleagues. 'I've definitely seen people swerve at lunch, not wanting to sit next to me for fear of what they're going to hear coming from my mouth,' she told fellow delegates at the launch meeting of her pornography taskforce this week, prompting a flutter of sympathetic laughter. Since being appointed by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak to lead an independent review into the regulation of online pornography in December 2023, Bertin has observed how a double taboo has made most politicians extremely reluctant to engage. Some simply find the subject hugely embarrassing; others stay silent because they do not wish to appear prudish by criticising the proliferation of extreme and often illegal pornographic material online. She is frustrated by this reticence. 'You can't leave the pitch on this stuff just because you're worried about being accused of being too strait-laced,' she says. The government needs urgently to appoint a minister for porn, she recommends, to ensure that the issue gets the attention it deserves, rather than being passed reluctantly between the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. A former adviser to David Cameron, Bertin has gathered cross-party support for her work and says she emails Keir Starmer so regularly about the issue that she has 'practically become his pen pal' (if you can have a pen pal who delegates to officials the responsibility of replying). 'We're really British about it so we don't want to have a graphic conversation about sex and porn,' she says, in an interview in the Westminster office she shares with several other peers. 'But you've got to shout about it as loudly as possible. The reason why we've got into this mess is because nobody has really wanted to talk about it.' By mess she means a situation whereby online pornography (which is viewed by an estimated 13.8 million UK adults every month) is not regulated to the same degree as pornography watched in cinemas or videos, despite the fact that videos have been redundant for decades and vanishingly few people now visit cinemas to watch porn. The absence of scrutiny has created an environment where much of the content created is, she says, 'violent, degrading, abusive, and misogynistic'. She also means a situation where a member of her own party had to resign after twice watching porn (perplexingly tractor-themed) on his phone, as he whiled away time on the green benches in the House of Commons. 'People have slightly lost the plot on porn. Would someone 20 years ago have just taken Playboy into the Commons, and had it lying on their lap? It just shows what an extraordinary place we've got to,' she says. 'You can do what you like in your private life – I don't have a problem with that – but you can't watch porn in the House of Commons, and you shouldn't be watching porn at your desk. There's a place for these things and it's not in the office.' Her review, published in February, made 32 recommendations. Last week the first of these became government policy, when officials announced that pornography depicting strangulation would be made illegal. Her new taskforce of 17 people, bringing together representatives from the police, the advertising industry, anti-trafficking organisations and violence against women charities, will focus on how to ensure harmful online content is better regulated, trying to bring parity between the scrutiny of offline and online content. She pays tribute to the 'hugely innovative side' of the porn industry, which has long driven technological advances in webcams and internet speeds, fuelled by the sector's enormous capacity to turn profit, but she has not invited any representatives on to the taskforce, wary of anything that might let the industry 'mark their own homework'. This week Ofcom announced that major online providers, including the UK's most popular pornography site, Pornhub, had agreed to implement stronger age-verification measures in compliance with the Online Safety Act, to prevent under-18s from accessing adult material. Those platforms that do not comply with the measures face being fined 10% of global turnover or being blocked in the UK. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Ofcom is also responsible for monitoring whether sites distributing user-generated pornography are protecting UK viewers from encountering illegal material involving child sexual abuse and extreme content (showing rape, bestiality and necrophilia, for example). However, other forms of harmful pornography that are regulated in physical formats are not subject to similar restrictions online. It is this grey, unscrutinised area that Bertin's panel will focus on, as well as calling for better processes to respond to stolen content, working out how people depicted in pornographic videos can request that the clips be removed from sites, and how to build safety mechanisms into AI tools that create sexually explicit content. Officials at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) guided her through short clips of extreme material to help her understand the nature of easily available harmful content. She remains disturbed by the material she saw – content designed to appear to be child sexual abuse, set in children's bedrooms – roles played by young girls, who may be over 18 but are acting as children. 'The titles are very problematic, things like: 'Daddy's going to come home and give his daughter a good seeing to' or 'Oops I've gone too far and now she's dead' or 'Kidnap and kill a hooker.'' This content would be prohibited by the BBFC in the offline world, but is unregulated online. During research for her review, she met representatives from global tech companies, and told them how when Volvo invented the three-point safety belt they gifted the patent to the rest of the industry because staff realised the innovation was so vital to raising safety standards. 'My pitch was that they have a duty and responsibility to double down on trying to get technology that can clean up these situations, and they should share that technology,' she says. 'Taylor Swift can whip a song off a website as soon as anyone tries to pirate it. There's no reason why the firms can't come up with technology to sort this out.' Posing for photographs, she edges away from a watercolour of Margaret Thatcher hung on the wall by one of her colleagues. 'Let's do it without Thatcher in the background. That's not my doing by the way – I share the office,' she says semi-apologetically, before rapidly adding: 'I mean I love Thatcher, obviously.' But she may be making an important distinction. In a 1970 Woman's Hour interview, Thatcher said the rise of pornography was a 'frightening' manifestation of a newly permissive society that she believed was undermining family life. Bertin describes herself as a liberal conservative and wants to be clear she is neither anti-porn nor running a moral crusade. 'Consenting adults should be able to do what they want; I have no desire to stop any kind of sexual freedom. But restricting people from seeing a woman being choked, called a whore, and having several men stamp on her – for example – is not ending someone's sexual freedom. This is the kind of content we want to end.'
The Independent
28-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Tory peer makes bold suggestion to combat violent porn
Baroness Gabby Bertin, who led a government-commissioned review, has proposed banning violent and misogynistic online pornography. She is advocating for the appointment of a dedicated minister for porn to ensure the issue is properly addressed, citing parliamentary reluctance to discuss the topic. The review, published in February, recommended giving Ofcom greater powers to regulate porn sites and ban content deemed too harmful for offline certification. The government has accepted one key recommendation from the review: making strangulation in pornography illegal. Recent Ofcom research revealed that 8 per cent of children aged 8-14 have viewed online pornography, prompting major sites to agree to stronger age verification measures, with potential fines for non-compliance.
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Unless you see it, you can't believe how bad it is': the peer demanding a minister for porn
When the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin arrived for a meeting with the the science and technology secretary, Peter Kyle, earlier this year she startled him by laying out an array of pornographic images across his desk. 'They were screengrabs showing little girls, their hair in bunches, and massive, grown men grabbing little girls' throats,' she says. She had selected images which appeared to depict child abuse, and yet were easily and legally available on a popular website. 'Unless you see it, you can't quite believe how bad it is.' The minister appeared shocked and upset by the images, she recalls, so she quickly tidied them away and later shredded them. Bertin has noticed that her desire to talk frequently and openly about extreme pornography is not shared by all her Westminster colleagues. 'I've definitely seen people swerve at lunch, not wanting to sit next to me for fear of what they're going to hear coming from my mouth,' she told fellow delegates at the launch meeting of her pornography taskforce this week, prompting a flutter of sympathetic laughter. Since being appointed by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak to lead an independent review into the regulation of online pornography in December 2023, Bertin has observed how a double taboo has made most politicians extremely reluctant to engage. Some simply find the subject hugely embarrassing; others stay silent because they do not wish to appear prudish by criticising the proliferation of extreme and often illegal pornographic material online. She is frustrated by this reticence. 'You can't leave the pitch on this stuff just because you're worried about being accused of being too strait-laced,' she says. The government needs urgently to appoint a minister for porn, she recommends, to ensure that the issue gets the attention it deserves, rather than being passed reluctantly between the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. A former adviser to David Cameron, Bertin has gathered cross-party support for her work and says she emails Keir Starmer so regularly about the issue that she has 'practically become his pen pal' (if you can have a pen pal who delegates to officials the responsibility of replying). 'We're really British about it so we don't want to have a graphic conversation about sex and porn,' she says, in an interview in the Westminster office she shares with several other peers. 'But you've got to shout about it as loudly as possible. The reason why we've got into this mess is because nobody has really wanted to talk about it.' By mess she means a situation whereby online pornography (which is viewed by an estimated 13.8 million UK adults every month) is not regulated to the same degree as pornography watched in cinemas or videos, despite the fact that videos have been redundant for decades and vanishingly few people now visit cinemas to watch porn. The absence of scrutiny has created an environment where much of the content created is, she says, 'violent, degrading, abusive, and misogynistic'. She also means a situation where a member of her own party had to resign after twice watching porn (perplexingly tractor-themed) on his phone, as he whiled away time on the green benches in the House of Commons. 'People have slightly lost the plot on porn. Would someone 20 years ago have just taken Playboy into the Commons, and had it lying on their lap? It just shows what an extraordinary place we've got to,' she says. 'You can do what you like in your private life – I don't have a problem with that – but you can't watch porn in the House of Commons, and you shouldn't be watching porn at your desk. There's a place for these things and it's not in the office.' Her review, published in February, made 32 recommendations. Last week the first of these became government policy, when officials announced that pornography depicting strangulation would be made illegal. Her new taskforce of 17 people, bringing together representatives from the police, the advertising industry, anti-trafficking organisations and violence against women charities, will focus on how to ensure harmful online content is better regulated, trying to bring parity between the scrutiny of offline and online content. She pays tribute to the 'hugely innovative side' of the porn industry, which has long driven technological advances in webcams and internet speeds, fuelled by the sector's enormous capacity to turn profit, but she has not invited any representatives on to the taskforce, wary of anything that might let the industry 'mark their own homework'. This week Ofcom announced that major online providers, including the UK's most popular pornography site, Pornhub, had agreed to implement stronger age-verification measures in compliance with the Online Safety Act, to prevent under-18s from accessing adult material. Those platforms that do not comply with the measures face being fined 10% of global turnover or being blocked in the UK. Ofcom is also responsible for monitoring whether sites distributing user-generated pornography are protecting UK viewers from encountering illegal material involving child sexual abuse and extreme content (showing rape, bestiality and necrophilia, for example). However, other forms of harmful pornography that are regulated in physical formats are not subject to similar restrictions online. It is this grey, unscrutinised area that Bertin's panel will focus on, as well as calling for better processes to respond to stolen content, working out how people depicted in pornographic videos can request that the clips be removed from sites, and how to build safety mechanisms into AI tools that create sexually explicit content. Officials at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) guided her through short clips of extreme material to help her understand the nature of easily available harmful content. She remains disturbed by the material she saw – content designed to appear to be child sexual abuse, set in children's bedrooms – roles played by young girls, who may be over 18 but are acting as children. 'The titles are very problematic, things like: 'Daddy's going to come home and give his daughter a good seeing to' or 'Oops I've gone too far and now she's dead' or 'Kidnap and kill a hooker.'' This content would be prohibited by the BBFC in the offline world, but is unregulated online. During research for her review, she met representatives from global tech companies, and told them how when Volvo invented the three-point safety belt they gifted the patent to the rest of the industry because staff realised the innovation was so vital to raising safety standards. 'My pitch was that they have a duty and responsibility to double down on trying to get technology that can clean up these situations, and they should share that technology,' she says. 'Taylor Swift can whip a song off a website as soon as anyone tries to pirate it. There's no reason why the firms can't come up with technology to sort this out.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Posing for photographs, she edges away from a watercolour of Margaret Thatcher hung on the wall by one of her colleagues. 'Let's do it without Thatcher in the background. That's not my doing by the way – I share the office,' she says semi-apologetically, before rapidly adding: 'I mean I love Thatcher, obviously.' But she may be making an important distinction. In a 1970 Woman's Hour interview, Thatcher said the rise of pornography was a 'frightening' manifestation of a newly permissive society that she believed was undermining family life. Bertin describes herself as a liberal conservative and wants to be clear she is neither anti-porn nor running a moral crusade. 'Consenting adults should be able to do what they want; I have no desire to stop any kind of sexual freedom. But restricting people from seeing a woman being choked, called a whore, and having several men stamp on her – for example – is not ending someone's sexual freedom. This is the kind of content we want to end.'
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
BBFC asks government to extend monitoring role to include online pornography
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has held discussions with the government over extending its role to include the monitoring of online pornography. At the inaugural meeting of the Independent Pornography Review taskforce – which brought together politicians, police and charities to discuss how to regulate harmful content on the internet – the BBFC's president, Natasha Kaplinsky, said the organisation hoped to take on the task. 'Legislation has existed for many years to protect the public from violent and abusive pornographic content offline, but online the law has not kept pace,' Kaplinsky said. She said the BBFC had been classifying offline pornographic content for 40 years and now wanted to extend its remit, taking on a statutory role online. 'We stand ready to better protect audiences online by taking on the formal role of auditing online pornography,' she said. The Conservative peer Gabby Bertin recommended that the BBFC should audit websites earlier this year when she published a review into harmful pornography, commissioned by former prime minister Rishi Sunak. She has established a taskforce of 17 people to examine how to bring parity to the regulation of online and offline pornography, reflecting the fact that the vast majority has long been viewed online, where it is subject to relatively little regulation. 'We can't let the taboo around this issue mean that the industry carries on going unregulated,' Lady Bertin said, launching the first session. She added that better monitoring of pornography online was crucial, given that it is viewed by an estimated 13.8 million UK adults every month, but stressed that the taskforce's work was 'not remotely a moral crusade'. 'When you have such a huge number of people watching this kind of content, you have to make sure that it's regulated. It would be unthinkable for the tobacco industry, the drinks industry or the gambling industry to have no proper scrutiny. This has to come to an end for the pornography industry,' she said. The Online Safety Act made the regulator Ofcom responsible for ensuring social media and pornography sites have effective age verification mechanisms. Ofcom also monitors whether sites distributing user-generated pornography are protecting UK viewers from encountering illegal material involving child sexual abuse and extreme content (showing rape, bestiality and necrophilia, for example). However, other forms of harmful pornography that are regulated offline are not subject to similar restrictions online. Research conducted by the BBFC found that one in three adult users had been exposed to violent or abusive content online in the past three months, seeing material depicting physical violence, non-consensual activity, and adults role-playing as children. This material would not have been classified as legal for viewing in cinemas or allowed to be sold on physical formats (videos or DVDs) by the organisation, but it does not reach the threshold of illegal content online, so is not part of Ofcom's remit. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion It is a criminal offence under the Video Recordings Act to distribute a pornographic video work that has not been classified by the BBFC. 'This content is violent, it's degrading, it's abusive, it's misogynistic,' Bertin said. 'We know what a detrimental effect it is having on society. It is starting to really play out in how young people have sex, view themselves and view each other.' Labour MP Jess Asato, one of the taskforce members, echoed the need for greater regulation and commended the government for its commitment last week to criminalising pornographic content featuring strangulation. 'Young women feel under pressure to play out the scripts their male partners learn from pornography and are pressured into painful and dangerous sex acts,' she said. 'Of particular concern to me is content that appears to depict sexual activity with children, featuring adult performers using props such as lollipops and teddy bears. This normalises the sexual abuse of children.' David Austin, the chief executive of the BBFC, said his organisation had had 'very constructive' conversations with the government over the possibility of taking on an extended role, but would not give details of how it would confront the huge task of monitoring harmful pornographic content online. A government spokesperson said that the recent decision to ban pornography depicting acts of strangulation came in response to Bertin's review, adding: 'Violence against women and girls is a national emergency, which is why our government is committed to halving it within a decade. Tackling extreme pornography is a vital part of this mission.'
