Of the many glorious features the internet possesses, the Mount Everest-sized pile of free available porn is selling point number one. But if a charity has their way, you could soon be forced to lay down your credit card details just so you can crank one out like the sinful pervert you truly are.
Charity group Porn Harms Kids (real name) has issued a plea for the Federal Government to force UK-style age verification measures onto all online porn across the Australian internet.
The UK Government has voted to adopt the stringent age-blocking tactics, which will be in place by April 2018. After then, UK residents keen on peepin’ the naughty stuff will have to input their credit card details in order to prove they’re of-age to view it. The theory there being that if you’re old enough to incur debt on a card, therefore you’re also old enough to shamefully rub one out in the Uni library toilets with your phone propped up on the cistern.
Porn Harms Kids director Tamara Newlands asserted that it was a duty of care issue to prevent children from accessing porn, which she states is a form of abuse.
Australia should follow suit because viewing pornography can be a form of sexual abuse for children.
Some of the things that have been seen are mental health issues, trauma, confusion around identity, grooming for sexual abuse, paedophiles, normalisation of abusive behaviour and can also lead to child-on-child sexual abuse.
But when we’re talking over 80 per cent of pornography being violence-based, most of it is going to be highly traumatic for children.
That 80% stat, for whatever its worth is from a 2010 study that cherry picked statistical anomalies and failed to take into account things like consensual BDSM. But, y’know, when you’ve gotta make a point you’ve gotta make a point, I guess.
Newlands further stated that “any porn hub” page features a litany of incest and pedophilia and called on the Government to take immediate and decisive action by caving to their demands entirely.
All it takes is access to the internet and children have access to pornography and you go to any porn hub page and it’s got incest and paedophiles and the images that you are receiving are really quite disturbing.
We think it’s great that they’re investigating but we need action. We need the Government to step in and say, ‘yes we will be implementing the age verification process’.
We don’t let children buy alcohol and enter alcoholic stores, we don’t let children buy cigarettes, we don’t let children enter sex shops and the same needs to provide for pornography.
Not to paint with a broad brush or anything but it’s nice to know that Marcia Langman finally decided to leave Pawnee after all these years.
Flippancy aside children’s access to harmful material online should always be an issue that needs to be addressed. But freely handing over credit card details? What could possibly go wrong there.
All past experiences with Government data collection has been universally positive and nothing has ever been horribly borked up.
*cough*
