Open petition: Ban children & their likeness being used to promote pornography or adult-content
Created by Sarah Linaker
Closes on
We want the Government to introduce legislation making it illegal to use children or their likeness in advertising, promotional material or social-media content to promote commercial pornography or adult-content businesses, including where the material featuring the child is not sexually explicit.
We believe there is a safeguarding gap where children, or dolls intended to represent children, can appear in otherwise non-explicit social-media content used to promote commercial adult-content businesses. Children cannot consent to such associations. We want clear legal boundaries preventing the use of children, or representations of children, to advertise or generate engagement for commercial pornography or adult content.
45,063 signatures
Petition progress
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Government responded to this petition
The Government is committed to keeping children safe and recognises concerns about the use of children in promoting adult content. Online safety, safeguarding and criminal law provide protections.
Read the response in full
Children have no place in explicit or pornographic content. It is a serious criminal offence to take, make, possess or distribute indecent photographs of children. This Government has strengthened the law in this area, criminalising the possession and publication of additional types of egregious pornography, including material depicting adults roleplaying as children. And we keep the law under constant review to ensure it remains effective.
The Government is committed to keeping children safe from harm and is aware of concerns about the use of children, or representations of children, in content associated with pornography or adult-content businesses. We recognise that these concerns extend to non-sexually explicit material used to promote adult content.
The Government is taking action now to protect children online and offline. Children who are experiencing, or likely to experience, significant harm should receive a child protection response, as set out in Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026. Through the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and the wider Families First Partnership Programme, we are introducing the biggest reforms to children's social care and child protection in a generation. These reforms are designed to ensure that babies and children experiencing harm receive the right support at the right time.
The Online Safety Act 2023 established a new set of laws to protect children and adults online, placing duties on regulated services to reduce the risk of illegal activity on their platforms. The Act requires platforms not only to take action against illegal content, including child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation content, but also to mitigate and manage the risk that their services are used for the commission or facilitation of relevant offences. Services are therefore expected to consider how the design and operation of their platforms may be used to support or promote criminal activity and to take proportionate steps to address those risks.
In practice, providers may take action against content that indicates, promotes or facilitates illegal activity, even where a particular item of content has not itself been determined to constitute illegal content. For example, this may include content, images, links or other material that providers have reason to believe are being used to facilitate, advertise or direct users towards child sexual abuse or exploitation offences. Ofcom's codes of practice set out measures that services can take to meet these duties, including content moderation, reporting systems, risk mitigation measures and terms-of-service enforcement.
A range of criminal offences may also be relevant, depending on the specific facts and circumstances. These include offences relating to indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children under the Protection of Children Act 1978 and Criminal Justice Act 1988, offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 relating to sexual activity involving or in the presence of a child, offences concerning the public display of indecent material under the Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981, offences under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 relating to the publication of obscene material, and communications offences under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. Whether any offence has been committed will depend on the particular facts of the case and, where relevant, whether material is considered indecent or obscene by the court.
This Government has also introduced a new criminal offence that criminalises AI models that have been optimised to create CSAM often containing the likeness of real children. We are also updating the existing law criminalising ‘paedophile manuals’ to cover Artificially Generated (AI) CSAM reflecting the evolving nature of online child sexual abuse (CSA).
The Government recognises the concerns raised. Whilst existing criminal offences and safeguarding measures provide a range of protections for children, we want to make sure that we are doing all we can to protect them. The Government will therefore continue to keep the effectiveness of all these protections under review, including considering whether further measures may be appropriate to strengthen these protections.
Ministry of Justice
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Government will respond to this petition
This petition got more than 10,000 signatures meaning that government will respond to it.
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Petition published
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If this petition gets 10,000 signatures, government will respond to it.
If this petition gets 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament.
This petition will stay open until 7 April 2027.