Children’s Commissioner overstates how many young children see pornography

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, said in an interview on Sky News on Sunday that a quarter of eight-year-olds, and half of 11-year-olds, have seen “the most heinous violent porn”.

And she made a similar claim in an appearance on Peston on ITV on 27 May, saying: “I know from my research that about 50% of 11-year-olds have seen the most heinous porn.”

But as far as we can tell, this isn’t true. And when Full Fact asked the Children’s Commissioner’s office about this subject, it told us the “correct” figures are those in its most recent report on the subject, which shows that young children are significantly less likely to see pornography than Dame Rachel claimed.

That report, published in August 2025, contains data from a survey of 1,020 16-21-year-olds, which showed that 70% had seen online pornography. Of those, 27% said they had seen it by the age of 11, which means that about 19% of all the young people surveyed said they had seen online pornography by that age. (The Children’s Commissioner’s office confirmed with us that the 27% is the share of the 70% who had seen pornography, not of the total.)

This is much lower than the 50% Dame Rachel mentioned, and it contradicts her claim about eight-year-olds too.

An earlier Children’s Commissioner survey, conducted at the end of 2022, found that 64% of respondents had seen online pornography—of which 10% had done so by age nine and 27% by age 11. This amounts to about 6% of all respondents seeing pornography by the age of nine and about 17% seeing it by 11.

Earlier research from 2016, commissioned by the NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner and conducted by Middlesex University, found that about 28% of 11-12-year-olds had seen online pornography.

Are these always the ‘most heinous’ cases?

These figures describe young people’s experience of pornography in general—not “the most heinous violent porn” that Dame Rachel mentioned.

The most recent report said that it was “normal” for the pornography children see online to be violent, but it does not say at what age children typically see this kind of pornography. The previous report said that 79% of respondents who had seen pornography had seen violent types before they were 18—but again, it doesn’t give detail about the ages at which this happened.

In a post on X sharing a clip from the Sky News interview, Dame Rachel suggested that the figures she mentioned might be preliminary results from her Big Future survey, which is currently open to submissions. If so, this would raise questions about their reliability. Since this is an opt-in survey, it might be subject to self-selection bias, where people who are more motivated by a subject are more likely to volunteer to answer questions about it.

When we asked Children’s Commissioner’s office about this, a spokesperson told us: “While the Commissioner’s recent comments reflect both those findings [in past reports] and discussions with young people in schools and communities across England about children’s online experiences, we are grateful to Full Fact for checking and are happy to clarify that the data in the published report are the correct figures.”