Children's safety duties

The children's safety duties, and those relating to reporting and complaints, require online services to use proportionate safety measures to keep children safe online. It’s about making sure you have the right measures in place to protect children from harm that could take place on your service.

If you are the provider of a user-to user service that is likely to be accessed by children, you will need to take proportionate measures to effectively:

- Prevent children of any age from encountering pornography, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder content (primary priority content). If your service does not prohibit one or more kinds of primary priority content for all users, you must use [highly effective age assurance](/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/category-1-10-weeks/statement-age-assurance-and-childrens-access/part-3-guidance-on-highly-effective-age-assurance.pdf?v=427202) to prevent children from encountering such content where it is identified on your service.
- Protect children in age groups judged to be at risk of harm from encountering other harmful content online. This includes content that is abusive or incites hatred, bullying content, violent content, and content which encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for dangerous stunts and challenges, and self-administering harmful substances (priority content), as well as other types of content that present a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the UK (non-designated content).
- Mitigate and manage the risks of harm to children [in different age groups](/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/category-1-10-weeks/statement-protecting-children-from-harms-online/main-document/childrens-risk-assessment-guidance-and-childrens-risk-profiles.pdf?p=59&v=396653) identified, using the best available information about the users on your service, in your children’s risk assessment.
- Mitigate the impact of harm to children in different age groups presented by content that is harmful to children.
- Explain how you’ll do this in your terms of service.
- Allow people to easily report content that is harmful to children and operate a complaints procedure.

If you are the provider of a search service that is likely to be accessed by children, you will need to take proportionate measures to effectively:

- Minimise the risk of children of any age encountering the most harmful search content to children, namely pornography, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder content (primary priority content).
- Minimise the risk of children in age groups judged to be at risk of harm from other harmful content from encountering it. This includes content that is abusive or incites hatred, bullying content, violent content and content which encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for dangerous stunts and challenges, and self-administering harmful substances (priority content), as well as other types of content that present a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the UK (non-designated content).
- Mitigate and manage the risks of harm to children in different age groups identified in your children’s risk assessment.
- Mitigate the impact of harm to children in different age groups presented by content that is harmful to children.
- Explain how you’ll do this in a publicly available statement.
- Allow people to easily report content that is harmful to children and operate a complaints procedure.

You can decide for yourself how to meet your legal duties. You can apply the measures that apply to your service set out in Ofcom’s Codes of Practice, or you can take alternative measures. If you take alternative measures to the ones we recommend, you must also maintain a record of what you have done and how you consider that they fulfil the relevant duties. In doing so, you must consider the importance of protecting users’ rights to freedom of expression and of protecting child users from breaches of relevant policy laws.