Sarah Harte: Do we just accept young children looking at porn as a fact of life?
Porn has the power to shape the sexual expectations of young people at a time when their beliefs about acceptable behaviour in relationships are forming.
It turns out we like porn. Recently, a European market research body called IntoTheMinds revealed that ‘adult websites’ topped Google searches by Irish people. This emerged from an analysis of internet search users in the 27 EU countries.
Adult websites were also the most searched keywords in Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Romania. The thought did occur that five of the countries listed have or had a strong Catholic tradition. Maybe this is a coincidence or maybe purity is the new sin.
Plenty of adults enjoy porn as part of a fun and engaging sex life. Where the problem arises is how commercial porn is produced and who’s watching it.
Last month, the French High Council for Equality published a report exposing the violence, and brutality in the porn industry, classifying much of pornography as an “illegal act of torture”. The council studied the four main pornographic platforms on the internet, including Pornhub, the world’s largest adult website, and found that 90% of the porn online consisted of practices that abused women with much of it illegal.
The report points out that actresses cannot enter into ‘consensual contracts’ as it’s legally impossible to enter into a contract to consent to an act of violence against yourself.
The other big issue is who is watching porn. We’ve slowly realised our children are, both through design and by accident through internet pop-ups. The statistics vary but suggest that 13 is the average age by which children have viewed porn, with some being much younger.
Experts including psychotherapist Richard Hogan in this newspaper warn that porn has the power to shape the sexual expectations of young people at a time when their beliefs about acceptable behaviour in relationships are forming. Domestic, sexual, and gender-based abuse campaigners recommend we educate our children helping them to recognise that the coercive or violent behaviour that promotes rape culture and feeds into the misogyny that underpins abuse is not reflective of normal, functioning relationships.
We disagree in this country on how and whether to do this at all which is why the derogation from the new Sexual, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) curriculum which grapples with porn continues at second level.
What most of us agree on is that we want to stop children from seeing porn. How do we achieve this? As things stand, children can enter the homepage of most porn sites, certify that they are over 18 by clicking a button, or enter a fictional date of birth and discover traumatising material.
Legal methods to prevent minors from seeing pornography are proving elusive. Plans for age verification regulations around harmful online content and porn were shelved here and in the UK because of European privacy law, something the French have just discovered.
Recently, the French moved to block access to pornographic websites for minors by putting the onus on porn platforms to effectively control the age of viewers on their sites by imposing age verification devices. The French media regulator had threatened to block companies from broadcasting in France unless they complied.
However, the regulator ran up against the brick wall of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Under the proposed French scheme users would have to apply for a government-licensed digital certification on their mobile phones to prove that they were at least 18, and this raised issues of collecting and storing sensitive personal data like a person’s porn content choices.
Attempts to impose age verification devices on porn companies have failed because they are not GDPR compliant and because in regulating children’s access to porn, age verification technology intersects with all users' most private data.
There is a risk of potential overreach and a potential conflict with the human rights of privacy and freedom of expression of other data users. You may not give two figs about the rights of pornography users but the law does. They look at the bigger picture because digital rights are human rights.
The creation of records of the public’s porn preferences creates security risks, with porn users' data being vulnerable to hacking and leaking with the risk of blackmail. Again, this may be low down on your list of concerns as a parent, (unless of course, your porn use is at risk of exposure).
Still, the bigger picture is that if you give back-door access to encrypted communications for good reasons, then you ultimately weaken the security of communications for everyone in other contexts.
Currently, in America, some states are forcing porn sites to authorise age verification by requesting users to produce passports and driver’s licences. They are free to do this because they’re not subject to European law.
However, lawsuits are already under way to challenge the new regulations which will rest on claims that freedom of speech has been curbed and they’ll probably succeed.
So, what do we do? Technologically savvy minors will always come up with workaround strategies but do we just accept young children looking at porn to their detriment as a fact of life?
Supposedly we are on the verge of a privacy-friendly age verification system technology that would minimise the data exchange and potentially comply with GDPR. This means at a European level, we should kick on with deciding a legal definition of what constitutes ‘harmful material’ and develop a common set of legal rules as to age verification that would sync with the tech once we iron out the GDPR kinks (pun intended).
Ideally, we would force porn companies to help ensure that children are safe online as the idea of a hugely lucrative porn industry, valued at up to $100 billion worldwide (estimates vary), stealing away our children’s innocence is deeply unpalatable. Massive dissuasive fines could be considered for breach of any rules because money is something the porn industry understands.
Meanwhile, as we play ‘catch-up’ a partial solution might be to force all porn sites to put their content behind paywalls restricting audiences to registered users. It’s far from perfect but it might lock some kids out and help prevent them from accidentally seeing internet pop-ups.
Of course, the elephant in the room around children and pornography consumption is that they are exposed to this content when they get smartphones. Somehow a mindless orthodoxy sprang up that we should give children smartphones, the average age for a child to receive a phone is nine. As parents, we need to rethink this one.
As Marcus Ranum, the American cyber security researcher said, you can’t solve social problems with software.
What is interesting in terms of young people is that repeated exposure to violent pornography as they grow up may be changing their cultural tastes. Last week, a report from the University of California, Los Angeles suggested Gen Z wants mainstream films and television shows to show less sexual content, and to focus on friendships and platonic relationships. It should be borne in mind the small study surveyed only 1,500 young people and didn’t ask about their porn use.
Still, maybe a generation that has been casually exposed to more violent sexual imagery than any previous one has simply had enough.
