Web firms offer parents right to veto porn sites

INTERNET providers are to make it easier for parents to block children from accessing pornography on the web.

Customers signing up with four of Britain’s biggest internet companies – BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media – will be offered an “active choice” over whether they want to impose parental controls on web access in their home.

The move is one of a number of measures announced yesterday to tackle the problem of sexualisation of childhood. A new website, ParentPort, will allow parents to raise complaints about internet content, TV programmes, adverts, videos, computer games and sexualised products such as clothes being marketed to children.

It will also provide advice on how to contact the regulators responsible for clamping down on inappropriate media and marketing activities.

Prime Minister David Cameron was hosting a Downing Street summit yesterday bringing together representatives of regulators, industry and parents to assess progress on the recommendations of an independent review by Mother’s Union chief executive Reg Bailey of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

Among the discussions were new guidelines, published last week by the Advertising Standards Authority, to restrict sexual images on billboards located where children are likely to see them, such as near schools.

And there will be a clampdown on “peer-to-peer” advertising by under-15s, where children are recruited by companies to promote their products to their friends via social-network sites such as Facebook.

A report, published in June, warned that modern life was putting children under pressure both to consume goods and services and to take part in a sexualised life before they are ready.