A month ago, Tory MP Claire Perry called for British ISPs to implement an “opt-in” system for internet pornography based on age verification, to prevent under 18s from looking at sexually explicit content online, because she believed that “British internet service providers should share the responsibility to keep our children safe.” Fortunately for us, culture and communications minister Ed Vaizey disagreed. “We believe in an open, lightly regulated internet,” he said. “The internet is by and large a force for good, it is central to our lives and to our economy and Government has to be wary about regulating or passing legislation.” Mr Vaizey suggested that taking responsibility for what your children see online and how they respond to it is kind of what parenting is all about.
Fine. Except that yesterday, Ed Vaizey made a dramatic U-turn by inviting ISP giants such as BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media to a meeting to discuss how they might implement such a system. “I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children,” he said, in a dramatic reversal of his stance four weeks ago.
This is worrying stuff for a whole host of reasons.
Firstly, there’s the practicalities of implementing the scheme:
The plan is to allow parents to ‘opt out’ of the sites and they will then be blocked at the source, rather than using conventional parental controls.
Adults who wish to view the material would have to choose to ‘opt in’.
Following their decision, homeowners would then be able to choose what sites they receive in a cinema style guide, such as U for all ages, or 18 for adults.
Got that? Unlike cinema style age controls, this wouldn’t be an individual decision, but a blanket one across a household. In short, it falls into the same trap as the Digital Economy Act. In order to prevent their children from viewing porn, parents would have to give it up themselves. Adults living at home? Forget it – you’re under your parents’ roof, you follow their rules. Households of shared adults, like most Londoners who don’t cohabit with a partner? You’d better have a good relationship with the housemate whose name is on the broadband account. What about students living in halls? Or adults who live with their landlords?
Either the system will impede the freedoms of adults across the country, or it will be so restrictive that no-one will use it. As Tom Scott writes for the Guardian:
Any “think-of-the-children” internet filter has a fundamental problem: if it’s effective enough to actually block adult content, it will also be irritating enough that almost everyone will turn it off.
An effective filter would have to censor Flickr, which has a large amount of adult imagery. It has to censor every blogging platform: Tumblr, for example, has a whole swathe of porn blogs, and there are untold numbers of sex bloggers writing reams of explicit text. And it has to censor YouTube, particularly if 4chan decide to flood it with porn again. Facebook could probably be let through, thanks to its strong filtering policies – although right now, most mobile providers block it for under-18s anyway.
If an adult content filter allows those sites through, it fails. And if it blocks those sites, then hardly anyone will use it – and it fails.
The rest of the article is well worth reading, picking up on a number of reasons such an approach would be impossible to implement effectively.
Secondly, the ‘research’ and ‘studies’ cited to justify this idea are problematic at best. Violet Blue reveals how the study from Psychologies magazine quoted in most news repots was in fact conducted on 14-16 year olds from a single North London school – hardly comprehensive data – and Ms Naughty digs into Safer Media, the Christian group who believe whole swathes of modern media are “harmful”, and from whom Ms Perry gets her “compelling evidence” that porn is damaging to under-18s.
I’ve written before about the myth that accessing pornography has a detrimental effect on young people and society in general. Bish Training, a sex ed resource for young people, summarises:
Even the briefest look on Google Scholar will show you that there is not a lot of rigorous academic research in this area. Arguments about porn, such as arguments about sexualisation, are usually values rather than evidence based. There is certainly no consensus in the academic world about young people and porn.
I would encourage you to read what I believe (I’m a practitioner, not an academic) to be the most thorough recent paper http://www.springerlink.com/content/c1k7r32gj9q72248/ It points out the lack of evidence of the extent of porn consumption and harms from previous research.
So much for evidence-based policy making. Claire Perry is quick to claim that “We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective,” but the sketchy nature of the research backing up her proposals suggests that this is an ideological move. Her next remark clarifies this ideology: “We just want to make sure children aren’t stumbling across things we don’t want them to see.” This isn’t about the fear of children’s sexuality: it’s about an angry controlling impulse on the part of parents who cannot bear that their children might like anything they don’t like, or have access to anything they don’t approve of. To people like this the internet represents an enormous ideological threat. A ‘nanny state’ approach is the only way they can shut down freedom of speech and information for those who disagree with them.
Whose ideology will inform this proposed ‘blacklist’ of forbidden sites to be referenced by ISPs? (And who will maintain the list of ‘opted-in’ households? Bet Wikileaks would love the chance to share that.) ‘Hardcore’ pictures and video – okay. Text? Usenet groups? Fanfic? Chatrooms? Any site posting user-generated content would find itself at risk unless it implemented strict moderation policies. What about humourous sites which include obscene language? Or sex education sites like the excellent Bish Training, which includes guidance for young people about porn? Queer and trans activists are concerned that any site providing support and information about LGBT issues will be blocked – the mental health effects of which on young people could be far more devastating than those claimed to be caused by porn.
And then there’s the civil liberties implications. Once a Great Firewall exists, what’s to stop its expansion to include other controversial sites, or anything the government disapproves of? Maybe Maimed has recently argued that the censorship surrounding Wikileaks has always existed around sex. Once porn is banned from the internet, you can bet that other problematic content would find itself caught in the same net.
Every week, I get letters from kinky people who are grateful to me for helping them feel they are not alone. I hear from mature individuals who are only just beginning to discover the vocabulary to think about their desires, or to start to come to terms with them. I am so lucky, they tell me, to have become aware of my sexuality so young, to have accepted it and be able to find so much joy in it, and help other people make peace with themselves. Alongside the self-indulgence of creative work that turns me on, that’s why I do what I do, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the internet.
I started having sex about the same time as I got online – when I was 13. By the time I was 15 I’d started using the internet to explore sexuality and kink in a big way, but it didn’t take over my life – I had many other hobbies and interests, and most of my online time was taken up with teaching myself HTML and design and creating vanity sites. I had my first serious play relationship when I was 16, which was very informed by the BDSM community I’d discovered online, and I met Tom when I was 19. I am enormously lucky to have been able to streamline my sexual development with the aid of online resources and support. If I hadn’t been able to access sexual content at home, I would have made different, less well-informed choices; I might have made some very bad decisions; and I certainly wouldn’t have reached a point where I could offer support and reassurance to others by my early twenties.
If you’re worried about what your child is looking at online, either install some of the parental control software which is readily available, or sit with them while they browse the internet. Either way, talk to them about what they’re seeing; teach them about staying safe online, give them the tools they need to question and critique what they encounter. Unlike our legislators, most UK kids are internet natives – they will easily be able to get around any controls we attempt to put in place. Trying to prevent them from accessing porn will simply increase its appeal. Ultimately, the responsibility for what we look at and how we respond to it is ours, and it falls to parents to teach that responsibility to their children, rather than dumping the hardest and most important parts of parenting onto corporations or the state.
–
All these things remain true, and given my audience I have little doubt that most of my readers will agree with me. Perhaps I didn’t even need to write this, since today senior officials from the ISPs themselves have condemned the proposals as unworkable. But this is not the first time this idea has surfaced, and I doubt it will be the last. Thanks to the anti-porn agenda of over-anxious mothers, we have already seen our government ban certain types of consensual porn entirely. When it comes to freedom of sexual expression, we cannot trust our legislators, and we must remain vigilant. I’m willing to bet that the idea of a filtered web will come back, and when it does, we need to be ready with our arguments as to why it will not work, and cannot ever be accepted.
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Great article. Knee jerk politics, always a mistake. Also i live in SW London and I see loads of kids using internet cafes, so how will that work. I would think it best not to drive your children away from reasonable adult guidance.
The Register has a different angle on this as a method to keep people talking without actually doing anything. They note that Vaizey has specifically said he doesn't want any legislation.
Most porn sites support porn filtering by one means or another. Northern Spanking as a random example plugs five filters at the bottom of its homepage.
If ISPs were to open negotiations to offer free porn filter software like they offer free AV and the like nowdays, that ought to keep this issue in limbo for another few years.
People who scream "think of the children" are not going to shut up no matter how many children die as a result of their hysteria. This, it is argued, is an attempt to keep said hysteria as a lower priority.
Internet cafes – and mobile phones, which don't use the same ISP as a household. Or indeed any public wifi system, or borrowed wifi … and that's before you get into the possibilities represented by TOR, proxies, BitTorrent…
I agree that most attempts to police the internet in this way are little more than futile gestures. As you say, they will do nothing to control USG on a wide range of sites.
I do think that parents have a right to try and protect their young children from experiences that may not harm them, but may bring into question the values that the parents are trying to instill in good faith. But I think casual sexualization in mainstream media i.e. page 3 is more harmful than explicit porn. Maybe labeling like 'This product may contain smut' should be mandatory.
And your line 'research from one North London school is hardly comprehensive' – well in way way it almost certainly is
TC
Thanks for a good post and an interesting collection of links. Of all possible tyrannies, the well-meaning tyranny is arguably the most insidious.
I believe that the 21st century will see, among other things, a fierce and prolonged ideological battle over the usage of the new information technologies. Just like the 19th and 20th centuries saw fierce ideological battles over what to do with the opportunities and the problems created by the industrial revolution. Fundamentally, it will be a struggle between those who want to use the new technologies in a liberal, perhaps even libertarian way, and those who want a strong, perhaps even complete state control. The current hoopla about WikiLeaks is just a first taste.
I am optimistic that the proponents of state control will ultimately lose the battle for the information age just as they lost the battle for the industrial age, but it will be long and arduous. In Germany, we recently had one of those idiotic nanny state proposals ourselves, a new "state contract for the protection of minors" that would have required everyone who hosts a website in Germany to make an estimate of what age it is suitable for and then self-apply a rating (age 12, age 16, age 18…) with accompanying filtering mechanism. That proposal officially fell through only a week or so ago because even our internet-illiterate politicans had realised by then, after consulting with a few experts, that the idea was totally impractical from a technical point of view and that it would have subjected webmasters to incalculable legal and financial risks. But I am sure that it will be resurrected in one form or another before too long.
I long to see the day when the majority of our legislators understands that it is called "world wide web" for a reason, not "deutschland web".
However, what was interesting about that debate was that a political magazine, I believe it was Der Spiegel, cited a recent scientific study about minors and internet pornography that was done by some German university. Contrary to what the scaremongers like to claim, the study found that the likelihood of minors "accidentally" viewing porn on the internet is very, very low. Maybe I will try to locate that study so I can cite it in a post of my own when the next nanny state proposal comes along.
Good stuff. The comparison with WikiLeaks is interesting. It used traditionally to be the case that Britain was sexually very repressive but in terms of political debate very liberal (which is why the country was a magnet for people like Marx) whereas on the continent there was plenty of porn but also lots of political prisoners. It's easy to see this as a whole new threat to freedom, but of course it was only the coming of the internet that forced the government to give up its decades-long fight against hardcore. As late as a decade ago Jack Straw was still trying to hold the line. Here's one of mine from ages ago that looks at some of the background. It could be that this is just traditional British values reasserting themselves.
Is this your coming out party? I've noticed your picture cropping up on my timeline several times, and Sunny asking you to share "any politically tinged blogs you write". Which is, as they say, interesting.
I too discovered sex and the internet in the same year, though in my case it was not at the age of thirteen. In fact it seems you've been sexually active longer than I have, which given the difference between our respective ages probably doesn't reflect well on either of us. Hmm.
As the Wikileaks furore shows, I think, the political class are adjusting badly to the fact that the world cannot be controlled in the way that it once was. Expect more attempts to drag the genie back in the bottle. (And Ludwig, I'm not sure that the battle for the industrial age is over just yet, not with the UK government considering new anti-Union measures.)
@ N. Craig: True. But I think that there exists a consensus among most parties in most Western countries about the fact that a mostly free economy is superior to a mostly planned economy. Disagreement remains about what level of state interference, social securities, redistribution of incomes etc. is necessary, but these are details by comparison.
Mind you, I am by no means a radical neoliberalist. I am a proponent of the (West) German model of the "social market economy", which I think has done very well for us, by and large, and which I think can continue to do well in the future, given the right reforms.
TC – your line 'research from one North London school is hardly comprehensive' – well in way way it almost certainly is
Ha! Nicely done
Of course parents have the right to try and protect their kids from things which oppose their worldview – and always will. But kids will always find ways around those limitations, outside the house, via friends and public libraries. The internet merely offers an extension of that process. I support the right of parents to use cybernanny software, but I also support the right of kids to get round it if they can. That's how we learn and grow up.
The casual objectification of women which surrounds children with the idea that women's first (and sometimes only) worth is their appearance and sexual appeal is everywhere we look – TV, films, adverts on telly and the tube, and the internet too. You can't hide kids from that stuff unless you lock them in a room, and you shouldn't try – much better to instead give them the tools to critique it.
Ludwig – that ideological battle has already begun – it is being waged around copyright, open data, personal privacy, state transparency, the music industry, all legislation affecting digital rights. The internet presents the biggest transformative bottom-up challenge to the status quo since the printing press, and those at the top have just as much to lose from it.
Interesting to hear about the legislative ups and downs in Germany. Don't I remember you telling me that you had an "opt-in" system for viewing porn at one point? Or am I misremembering?
Heresiarch – point taken about the history of prudishness in Britain. I find it difficult to separate from Christianity – the factoid about porn being one of the first things to be disseminated using the printing press springs to mind.
I have no regrets about my sexual choices as a teen; it was inevitably emotionally messy but I didn't have many bad experiences. I actually waited until I was 16 before having heterosexual sex, if that helps you feel better.
As for the other question – you're doing that thing again, remember, the one we told you not to do? Stop trying to be clever about things you don't know about. It's all under control.
Turns out the service providers are going to tell him it just won't work – including many of the reasons you give.
Personally I like the idea of the .xxx web domain names. Put all the overt porn on there, give parents etc a nice easy way to opt OUT if they don't want to see it. The rest of us can access as we want.
They need to do something about pay as you go debit cards as well. At the moment under 18s can get these. Website owners need a nice simple way of confirming over 18 status to allow access to member areas.
John
@ Pandora: "Don't I remember you telling me that you had an 'opt-in' system for viewing porn at one point? Or am I misremembering?"
You are misremembering. What you may be remembering is the following subject, which we once talked about:
If you host an adult website in Germany, you the webmaster are required by law to use an "effective" and rather tiresome age verification service. One where people have to go someplace (in the real world) to get their ID and their age verified so they can get an age verification login / pass to look at adult content. Of course, no one ever does that ("Hi, I am here to get my age verified because I want to look at internet porn!"). Instead, people simply look at all the porn that is available on websites hosted outside of Germany, where all you have to do is "Click here if you are over 18".
So, the regulation is not preventing a single minor from looking at porn, because they, too, could simply visit the non-German websites. All the regulation does is create a massive business disadvantage for German adult webmasters. They have complained about this in various courts, but so far to no avail.
In the meantime, the main result is that most German porn producers have moved their servers to the Netherlands, Switzerland or any place where such restrictive regulations do not exist.
I'd like to think children learn to grow up by challenging and bending rules rather than just breaking them. Otherwise we should conclude all rules are worthless and most of us, particularly over time, conclude that some rules are better than no rules. And that actually, sometimes the grown ups do know best and are acting in children's interests.
But perhaps I think this because I am at a stage in life when I and others expect me to make rather than break the rules.
TC
I just took a YouGov survey about this. Argued against the 'opt-in' option but for '.xxx' domains.
TC
Hi, Pandora
Thanks for a really thought-Provoking post on an important issue. It inspired me to write my own post exploring my views on the issue – just posted:
http://www.spankingwriters.com/blog/2010/12/24/the-porn-ban/
So we can have an informed debate, those proposing the UK ban need to be brave and clearly define what they understand is pornographic. I think we’ll be waiting for a long time, because the proposers are generally perturbed by the sex they’re not getting, and their cynical exploitation of the lazy and popular confusion of pornography and erotica gives them all the tabloid inches they need to divert attention from far more serious issues. “Intended to deprave and corrupt…” Who? Servants? “…Which a reasonable person would find was intended to be sexually arousing…” Reasonable person? That’s a term-of-art which is as varied and flexible as road-full of rubber tires. Sexually arousing? By whom? Men? Women? Gay? Straight? Roman Catholic? Jew? What’s the test? Penile centimeters? Good law must sit on the principle of measurement e.g. too fast, defrauded. too many, substandard, not someone’s erectile impressions.
No, the intention of the debate and any legislation is simply to give politicians the right to say “We’re doing something to protect our children” when in fact, with the curtailment of free children’s books in England they are doing the opposite. It’s the deceitful hypocrisy that oils the revolving doors between them and the fourth estate.
I know several who have contributed to this thread. By and large, you represent a far higher level of education than the Great British public that the politicians need to deceive, would ever wish to aspire to. BDSM is by and large an educated person’s pursuit. You are thinkers. Their currency of coercion is the fiery outrage of the fearful, which is happily enflamed by the manipulative right-wing press. It baffles us in the US, why Ohio, home to so many of the dirt poor rust-belt unemployed regularly returns precisely the party which allowed their jobs to be uncontrollably outsourced in the first place. It shouldn’t baffle; fear is a primæval instinct; applied thought is bounty of education, reasoning, extended attention spans and civilization.
…
Last year I collaborated on bringing a ‘social conscious’ piece to stage to show some of the awful things going on in the world – particularly with children. The show was widely reported. The theatre was full with around 2,000 audience members of which around 10 to 15% were minors, many below 10 years of age. Never once did my producer say I should adapt, edit, censor or cushion the piece; on the contrary it was decided to set the tenor of the whole show by leading with this piece. On TV/radio our kids see/hear even worse reports from the Indonesian tsunami, knee-cappings in Ulster, lynchings in Texas, the road-side bombs, mutilation of women in sub-Saharan Africa or earthquakes in Haiti. Being exposed to this information is part of the learning process we all need to develop in order to manage informed choices as we grow up.
I don’t like the word pornography. I’d prefer the reference always to be to ‘erotic expression’ that can be artistic or not. Erotic expression is a function of the tastes we develop as we grow older. Like Pandora, I had my first really powerful erotic experiences when I was in my very early teens. My mother made wise judgments, and she and her friends lived very open lives – free of fear and censure regarding sexual matters. I was/am young enough to remember that children always learn on their own level.
Here in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, as in the Tate collections in England or the Pinakothek in Munich, you’ll find the works of Carravagio, Titian, the Gentileschis, Hans Belmer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton etc.etc. on the walls and in the bookshops alongside the coloring books intended for kids. What does a kid think of an image of Mapplethorpe’s stapled prick or a whipstock up his rectum? I can remember, “Ouch that, that looks uncomfortable.”[but far less disturbing than a heap of bodies or a man being waterboarded in Abu Grahib], and move on to something more interesting like a kaleidoscope, electronic art or an art-deco poster of a racing car.
So my definition of erotic expression which should be openly available are those works which any member of the school parties who browse around our state and municipally supported galleries or Bandes desinées departments of bookstores can see. To be taken seriously, the politicians need come to terms with the dichotomies between that and their desires to protect; or do they really prefer to outsource control to a Chinese designed internet firewall that their less benign successors can use in the future to tyrannise us?
R
Last year I collaborated on bringing a ‘social conscious’ piece to stage to show some of the awful things going on in the world – particularly with children. The show was widely reported. The theatre was full with around 2,000 audience members of which around 10 to 15% were minors, many below 10 years of age. Never once did my producer say I should adapt, edit, censor or cushion the piece; on the contrary it was decided to set the tenor of the whole show by leading with this piece. On TV/radio our kids see/hear even worse reports from the Indonesian tsunami, knee-cappings in Ulster, lynchings in Texas, the road-side bombs, mutilation of women in sub-Saharan Africa or earthquakes in Haiti. Being exposed to this information is part of the learning process we all need to develop in order to manage informed choices as we grow up.
I don’t like the word pornography. I’d prefer the reference always to be to ‘erotic expression’ that can be artistic or not. Erotic expression is a function of the tastes we develop as we grow older. Like Pandora, I had my first really powerful erotic experiences when I was in my very early teens. My mother made wise judgments, and she and her friends lived very open lives – free of fear and censure regarding sexual matters. I was/am young enough to remember that children always learn on their own level.
Here in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, as in the Tate collections in England or the Pinakothek in Munich, you’ll find the works of Carravagio, Titian, the Gentileschis, Hans Belmer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton etc.etc. on the walls and in the bookshops alongside the coloring books intended for kids. What does a kid think of an image of Mapplethorpe’s stapled prick or a whipstock up his rectum? I can remember, “Ouch that, that looks uncomfortable.”[but far less disturbing than a heap of bodies or a man being waterboarded in Abu Grahib], and move on to something more interesting like a kaleidoscope, electronic art or an art-deco poster of a racing car.
So my definition of erotic expression which should be openly available are those works which any member of the school parties who browse around our state and municipally supported galleries or Bandes desinées departments of bookstores can see. To be taken seriously, the politicians need come to terms with the dichotomies between that and their desires to protect; or do they really prefer to outsource control to a Chinese designed internet firewall that their less benign successors can use in the future to tyrannise us?
R
[...] wrote about this in December last year when the Tory proposals were first publicised. This is part of a large-scale campaign against the [...]
Great article i could say, waiting for more!