The UK will elect a new government on 7 May 2015 and the Conservative party say that if they win they’ll compel internet service providers (ISPs) to block sites that don’t provide effective age verification.
Any businesses that don’t comply will get shuttered, according to culture secretary Sajid Javid.
The Guardian quotes him:
If you want to buy a hardcore pornography DVD in a store you need to prove your age to the retailers.
With the shift to online, children can access adult content on websites without restriction, intentionally or otherwise.
As a father to four young children, I worry, like every other parent, how easy it is for them to view explicit material.
That is why we need effective controls online that apply to UK and overseas.
This is about giving children the best start in life; we do not want to prevent adults from accessing legal content but we do want to protect our children from harmful material, so they are free to develop a healthy attitude to sex and relationships.
National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) chief Peter Wanless told The Guardian that the “easy availability” to children of online pornography, much of it “extreme, violent and profoundly degrading”, is of deepening concern.
It can leave them feeling frightened, confused, depressed or upset. The number of [ChildLine] counselling sessions regarding porn more than doubled last year to over 1,100 with some young girls revealing they were being pressured to mimic scenes from adult films.
Child experts say that easy porn access normalises sexuality, which in turn normalises potentially dangerous sexual behaviour, including sexting.
According to a 2013 poll of 500 children conducted by ChildLine, 60% had been asked for a sexual image or video.
Of those polled, 38% had complied.
Those numbers are a few years old. It’s probably safe to presume that the situation has grown worse.
But even these two-year-old figures point to a plethora of images that can be used for sextortion, cyberbullying or otherwise abusing children.
Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), said at the time that the poll results came out that the foundation had tracked a “marked rise in self-generated sexual content featuring young people”.
Some of those sexts are intercepted and sold, she said:
A snapshot study conducted by IWF analysts over a 47-hour period found well over 12,000 self-generated images and videos of young people online. Most recently, we see images and videos being gathered together and sold for commercial gain.
Sexting images can also be used by children to cyberbully each other, which, in turn, has resulted in numerous suicides or suicide attempts.
There are yet more associated risks.
From a 2014 Texas State University paper:
Sexting, coupled with teenage sexual experimentation, curiosity, and the sexualization of youth, has presented a new form of risky behavior, resulting in possible legal consequences for youth who engage in such acts (American Psychological Association, 2010; Calvert, 2009; Willard, 2010). Some of these legal interventions have the potential to leave youth branded as (registered) sex offenders. Thus, the consequences of sexting are serious and can negatively affect teenagers for many years after the act has occurred, such as difficulty in attaining future employment, housing, licensing, and educational financial benefits.
Clearly, making it tougher for underaged people to get their hands on explicit, degrading and/or violent porn is a valid goal, as is decreasing the casual sharing of sexual images that can lead to dire results, be it cyber bullying, suicide or a criminal record.
Adolescent brains continue to develop well into the 20s, psychologists have discovered, as the brain gradually gets better at making neural connections necessary to plan ahead, weigh risks and rewards, and make complex decisions.
Even intelligent teenagers act stupid around their friends as they crave the attention and approval of their peers.
Making sexual imagery much less available to children is therefore an understandable goal.
It’s also in keeping with the UK’s ongoing efforts to clean up the online smut cornucopia, from the 2012 Online Safety Bill, stating that ISPs and mobile telcos should provide a porn-free internet connection by default, on up to the more recent push to censor legal but unsavoury content.
Keeping porn away from kids is a worthy goal to aim for, but that doesn’t mean that age verification of explicit porn can actually work.
Facebook’s inability to keep out kids under 13 comes to mind.
In research from 2011, New York University found that 55% of children under the age of 12 had a Facebook account, in spite of Facebook’s age limit of 13.
It’s been estimated that millions of pre-teens log in to Facebook every day.
How do the Tories expect the porn companies to succeed where others, including Facebook, have failed?
Image of no children sign courtesy of Shutterstock.