A timely exploratory study of young adults’ psychosexual responses to the UK’s new age verification law on online pornography

Age-verification policies for online pornography aim to protect minors, yet their effects on young adults, a developmental group still consolidating sexual identity and norms, who are legally permitted to access such content, remain underexamined. We employed a mixed-methods design with two independent cross-sectional samples of UK young adults aged 18–25 (N=1,388) who reported pornography use in the past year. Participants completed measures assessing pornography use patterns, content preferences, and sexual shame; post-policy participants additionally responded to open-ended questions about the regulation. Quantitatively, post-policy changes varied by relationship status and gender: single participants reported higher secret solitary use; partnered men reported lower shared use; partnered women reported lower secret solitary use. Preferences across all content categories declined post-policy. Although 18.6% discontinued use post-policy (predominantly women), sexual shame did not differ between wave 1 users, wave 2 continued users, and wave 2 stoppers. Qualitatively, participants described divergent psychological experiences, ranging from shame and anxiety to confidence, calm, or minimal changes. Participants interpreted age verification as transforming pornography access from anonymous to subjectively identity-linked, raising concerns about surveillance, moral stigma, and data vulnerability. Reported adaptive strategies included platform avoidance, migration to unregulated spaces, usage reduction, and VPN-based circumvention. Findings reveal that age verification operates not merely through access friction, but by fundamentally reconfiguring the perceived visibility and social legitimacy of consumption. Policy effects were heterogeneous and gendered, suggesting that regulatory impacts extend beyond stated protective aims and warrant careful consideration of unintended consequences for legal-age users in digital content regulation.