Over half of children experience 'harmful' content online

UK government research shows over half of children have accessed harmful content online despite the Online Safety Act's July 2025 age verification requirements; nearly two in five children surveyed have successfully circumvented age checks, primarily through false identity claims and VPNs. If you build age verification or content filtering, the UK's real-world data just proved your baseline assumption wrong: no technical measure stops determined users, and VPN adoption is your actual problem, not tick boxes. Ofcom is escalating enforcement, but fines won't fix the gap—you're selling into a regulation that's already failing its own test.