Children: Sexually Explicit Material

House of Lords written question – answered at on 15 July 2013.

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Photo of Baroness Benjamin Baroness Benjamin Liberal Democrat

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to prevent young children from watching highly sexualised music video content online.

Photo of Lord Gardiner of Kimble Lord Gardiner of Kimble Lords Spokesperson (Department for Culture, Media and Sport), Lord in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)

Currently under the Video Recordings Act 1984, music DVDs are exempt from any requirement to be age rated by the British Board of Film Classification and thus can be supplied to anyone of any age. Following a full public consultation on this issue, in May 2013 Government announced it would be bringing forward legislation to ensure that music DVDs—and DVDs in other exempt genres—are age rated by the BBFC in future if they are unsuitable for children younger than 12.

Government also announced that more would be done to help ensure parents can make informed decisions about the video content their children may wish to access online. We are asking industry to develop solutions by the end of the year so that more online videos, especially those such as music videos that may be popular with children, carry advice about their age-suitability and content. We want to make sure content labels are clear and easily understandable to British families and that age ratings can be tagged and incorporated into the meta data of the content file so that parental content control software can recognise them.

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