Campaigners threaten UK legal action over porn sites’ lack of age verification

Exclusive: failure to prevent children seeing online porn puts them at risk of abuse and lifelong trauma, say children's safety group

The UK data watchdog must introduce age verification for commercial pornography sites or face a high court challenge over any failure to act, children's safety groups have warned.

The demand in a letter to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) states that the government's failure to stop children seeing porn is causing lifelong trauma and putting children at risk of abuse and exploitation. It urges the ICO to use the powers under the recently introduced age appropriate design code (AADC) to introduce rigorous age-checking procedures for publicly accessible porn sites.