Evidence That UK Needs Mandatory Porn Filters? Informal Survey Done At One School
from the serious-policymaking-much? dept
In the UK there is currently a campaign and associated petition from the organization "Safety Net: Protecting Innocence Online", which calls for mandatory Net filtering of pornography -- people would need to opt out of the system if they wanted to view this material. The justification -- of course -- is the usual "won't someone think of the children?" Here's the pitch:
Every day children and young people are accessing mainstream pornography on the internet, including the most hardcore, violent and abusive images. Evidence clearly shows pornography has a detrimental impact on children and young people including premature sexualisation, negative body image and unhealthy notions about relationships. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Nick Pickles from Big Brother Watch looked into what that "evidence" might be, and found something rather interesting:
One of the key statistics relied upon by the campaign is that "1 in 3 10 year olds have seen pornography online". They do recognise it was published in Psychologies Magazine in 2010, but the appearance is given that this is a serious statistic. It’s also used in their 'Key Facts' briefing.
Actually, it's even more ridiculous than that. That "statistic" states "[a]lmost one-third first looked at sexual images online when they were aged 10 or younger." But as is well known, UK newspaper titles like Rupert Murdoch's "The Sun" carry "sexual images" -- pictures of topless women -- every day. Given the large circulation of the those titles, it's far more likely that children will have seen "sexual images" there, rather than online, and that their attitudes to women will have been harmed more by this kind of relentless objectification than by isolated images they come across on the Internet. And yet strangely no one is calling for Rupert Murdoch's newspapers to be censored.
When you dig a little deeper however, that definitely isn't the case. The full section in the magazine reads:
"We've had plenty of letters from concerned readers on this very topic, and when we decided to canvass the views of 14- to 16-year-olds at a north London secondary school, the results took us by surprise.
So, the statistic -- […] at the heart of the petition's press release -- is based on one magazine's anecdotal research at a single school.
Almost one-third first looked at sexual images online when they were aged 10 or younger."
It's a classic demonization of the Internet that ignores the broader context, and is based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Worryingly, the UK government is sending out clear signals that it supports this campaign regardless. It's currently conducting a consultation on "Parental Internet controls", which closes on September 6. It's extremely poorly worded and clearly biased in favour of the idea of making blanket censorship the default.
If such Net blocks are brought in, legitimate sites will inevitably be blocked by mistake, but it's not so clear that the objectives of protecting children will be achieved. With blocks in place, parents may be lulled into a false sense of security, and so fail to supervise their children's online activities adequately, which will leave the latter exposed to greater not lesser risks. Meanwhile, young people will find ways to circumvent the blocks -- or just buy a copy of "The Sun".
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Filed Under: evidence, porn filters, surveys, uk
Reader Comments
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Re:
So you're saying you'll never approve of an un-censored internet?
Even if the statistic were valid, it should be restated as, "1 out of 3 sets of parents of children have let their children use the internet unsupervised at a young age."
Nobody is screaming to outlaw parental irresponsibility despite the fact that it's the actual underlying cause for the issue. Where are proposals for a law that charges parents for letting their children see pornography?
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Re:
There are perfectly good internet fiolters that can be used on a home or school network such as dans guardian, and dns server that also do such filtering. These are opt-in systems, and require a small amout of effort to use.
Would you agree if techdirt got added to the block list. It sometimes uses adult language.
This sort of system could all too easily become a light form of censrship, Get a site added to the list to cut down its effectiveness. Also how long before the usual suspects get 'pirate' sites added to the list?
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Re:
Forgive if if I disagree. The costs to society of such censorship are far greater than any proven harm caused by viewing pornography.
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You really think this compares to some of the more depraved shit on the net that is readily available?
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Re:
Also, depraved is relative. Some might think a pic of a young mom breastfeeding a baby is depraved.
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Re: Re:
For you AC:
The magazine survey didn't ask or say if children had seen some of the more depraved shit on the net, it said one third of under tens had seen sexual images, any sexual images.
Also, what definition of readily available are you using.
Readily available if you go looking for it or readily available as in shoving itself in front of your retinas when you search for pluming supplies.
For Ninja:
"it's with the light pictures that comes the interest for more depraved material." - link?
I would have thought it more reasonable to suggest that interest in porn comes from unfulfilled and usually fairly basic sexual urges are going unfulfilled.
Feeding a woman's breasts to a baby is depraved and misogynistic in the extreme! ...
Ooops, misread that
breastfeeding is, naturally, fine.
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Re: Re: Re:
Poorly written, my apologies. I mean that for a teenager without proper parental care (which excludes any idiotic Govt interference) then it may lead said teenager to look for further 'depraved' material and create a twisted, artificial view of sex. And yes, unfulfilled sexual urges can lead to interest in porn but I'd argue that applies to healthy individuals too ;)
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Blinded by the beaver shot...
Sexual imagery is everywhere. It's not all extreme.
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Do you have any evidence that the depraved shit was what the kids were talking about? There's also far more explicit material available on top shelf magazines in the same newsagents, but the Sun's publishability is not judged by that...
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And it's amusing:
unhealthy notions about relationships
My relationship with my girl is everything most of these moralist morons would find unhealthy. And yet we have a load of fun and we love each other. And for the record, I first saw a porn pic when I was 12 ;)
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Re:
/s
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Yet, if suddenly, they see the exact same content on a computer screen...that's when its evil? That's when we must lose our heads and stop thinking?
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I don't care what anyone says
If parents don't want children accessing porn, they should take responsibility themselves to educate their children on the subject and to monitor their Internet use. If they want to they can also put a block on certain types of content, it's not bloody difficult.
There seems to be a culture, nowadays, where parents expect everyone else to protect their kids but don't want to do the work themselves.
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Re: I don't care what anyone says
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Re: Re: I don't care what anyone says
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Re: Re: I don't care what anyone says
If you're searching for information in the way that most people would by default nowadays (google it instead of guessing domains, safesearch on by default, etc), it's unlikely that you'll simply stumble across porn and the likelihood is becoming less and less with each passing year as optional filtering improves.
I'm not saying it won't happen, but the likelihood is definitely not something you want to base laws on as the unintended consequences are likely to be far more damaging.
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Re: I don't care what anyone says
There seems to be a culture, nowadays, where parents expect everyone else to protect their kids but don't want to do the work themselves.
And there seems to be a culture where Governments want to be the parents of all children while at that.
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Re: I don't care what anyone says
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Demarcation!
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Re: Demarcation!
So, once again, they run off legislating without fact checking. Politics as usual.
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Re: Re: Demarcation!
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Re: Re: Demarcation!
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Re: Re: Re: Demarcation!
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Re: Demarcation!
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Typo?
I read "Given the large circulation of the those titties..."
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Re: Typo?
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Re: Re: Typo?
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"Have you ever seen a naked person on the internet?"
==> "Yes"
"Have you ever seen a money shot on the internet?"
==> [Child googles "money shot."] "Yes."
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Re:
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Evidence clearly shows pornography has a detrimental impact on children and young people including premature sexualisation..."
"Premature sexualization"? Wouldn't that be call puberty?
"... negative body image..."
I do question my own appearance, but I am at least satisfy with what I am now and I do want to improve my image. And this isn't thanks to porn that made me think about my body.
"... and unhealthy notions about relationships."
Who needs porn when you have Twilight to show you how an unhealthy relationship turns out?
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The horror!!!
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Extra long second point, you can not say they were simply exposed, that says nothing. They were likely exposed to a sexual image NOT on the internet LONG before they were exposed to one on the internet. There is a significant difference between
1.'Ah, ok, I didn't know what that was. Don't want to go there again'
2.'What is with all these pictures? I can't find a funny cat picture without seeing one every other click',
3.'Finally, found what I was looking for'
The is only a problem of protection when it is the second scenario/thought process, which is not a problem for the majority of businesses in the world that make more use of the internet every day than these kids.
As for the other two. The first one is called learning, which is why they are supposed to be supervised to tell them before the find out themselves.
The third is hopefully not an issue with kids under 10, but if it is and the only solution is a filter, someone just screwed up because the kid just went and got physical copies of what they wanted or they were encouraged to learn how to bypass filters.
Unless the UK has a different Internet, filters are not going to be a solution for any problem they could be having.
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Re:
This. I was exposed to porn in the 10 year old range, before I had a computer or access to the internet - because few knew anything about "the internet" in 1990. I don't have distinct memories of which was first, but either a friend found a stack of his father's magazines, or an older cousin with his magazines were probably first. Depending on how loose your definition is, postcards of women in bikinis and wet t-shirts from the family's annual vacation to the beach might beat the others.
The objectification of women IS a problem, but it was around long before the internet.
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Re: Re:
If the kid doesn't bring it up as a problem, then it is more likely to be uninteresting, forgetable, and not harmful to the kid in any significant way, until that is the adults continue to make them think about it.
A very telling point is, where are the children complaining about to much porn in their internet?
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Re: Re: Re:
So really, in spite of the false and wildly inaccurate data given by SafetyNet, the psychology behind other studies provide some clue as to the difference in ease of access to said porn.
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I can definitely drink to that. It was hard doing those things you mentioned, you actually had to put effort into it.
Today's internet porn industry is a huge problem. It accelerates the problem of objectification further. It used to be that in my day at that age, dialiup hampered the speed at which you got it, and getting to it was a chore because you couldn't hide the noise modems made in the middle of the night, so even then it was difficult.
I do agree that it has ALWAYS objectified women in a bad way.
Odd enough, porn is way too easy to find these days so instead of a few instances of swift views in sneaked rated-R films, blurry worn out pieces of paper and magazines, or dialiup modems (keeping the healthy mystery), you get an overload of the wrong message about women to kids that way.
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Re: Re: Re:
You should have added the M0 flag in your modem's init string ! At least that's what I did back then !!
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Me too. One of the things lacking about taking this study at face value is that it doesn't show historical changes. If they'd have asked the same questions of kids in the same age group at the same school every few years for the last few decades, we may be able to see that this is something new and related to increased online activity.
As it is, they don't know if the kid in 2012 is really seeing any more than the same kid would have seen in 1992 except that it might be conceivably be easier to stumble across images online. But is it more likely than stumbling across Dad's porn stash or seeing a mate's spank mag he nicked from the local newsagents (my first exposure to porn by the way, several years after seeing boobs in The Sun).
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However I would like to see 3 types of internet.
One for Pornography
One for Commerce
One for Community
In a nutshell that would mean if I want porn I go to the Porn web
to buy stuff the commerce web
for research the community web
So unless I want adds and people trying to sell me stuff or
Porn I would not have to see them
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Re:
Splitting up the internet is a horrible idea.
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Re:
Sounds like you have a virus. I recommend AVG or Microsoft Security Essentials. AVG's a little bloated and MSE is, well, Microsoft.
In related anecdotal evidence; in 7 years of working as tech support, I have never accidentally (or intentionally) found porn on my work PC. There was only one time where there was porn on my monitor and that was due to me being remoted into a client's PC who was infected by a virus.
It wasn't due to lack of surfing, or some kind of filter, it just didn't happen.
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Also there are some porn sites that are simply way OTT
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Kid's
The best way to resolve this would be for all porn to be moved onto the xxx domain's, it is much easier to block a domain range than site by site, also responsible parents will discuss only briefly the need to avoid porn and not make a big issue about it.
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Re: Kid's
Yup this Dilbert cartoon says it all.
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Re: Kid's
Guess how many of them I saw in the following few years, completely uncut, even if they were complete banned from the country? A lot, I can tell you...
"The best way to resolve this would be for all porn to be moved onto the xxx domain's"
Nice idea in theory, but completely unworkable in practice. Unless you completely destroy the ability of anyone to set up a website without prior vetting, you can't guarantee that only .xxx addresses will have porn, and then you have the completely unworkable cultural differences that would make it impossible to agree on what determines porn in the first place. You would need international agreement for such a system to work, but one country might say that Britney concert footage is tantamount to porn, while another might think that topless 16 year olds or mere softcore sex footage doesn't fit in that category.
The only way to deal with this is with full information for parents on how and what to filter, and responsible parenting to back that up. Equally unlikely, I know, but at least it's possible in some families.
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Mind of a 10 year old...
Onward to things about 10 year olds:
Psychology teaches us that the moment you leave your mother's woom, you are brought up or nurtured. Mind you that you still have a disposition of shyness or of being outgoing naturally, the rest is most certainly developed over time. I'm all for censorship of porn in schools. It's a place of learning. So while the data SafetyNet puts out about what is pornography is wrong, the psychology is somewhat more accurate. The sexual representations that pornography gives is certainly detrimental to the mind of a 10 year old. It's one thing that they see how things are done medically, it's another to show them what to expect in a mate when seeing porn.
My view on porn:
When you have sex, most of the fun is the mystery of trying to get to know the person you are mating with. Pornography, with all it's fake moaning and loud groaning, makes people wha are none the wiser think that's what you should expect. One of the things I used to advise couples visiting my office on is that porn sucks the fun out of sex. I roll my eyes inwardly every time the husband or the wife makes the excuse that they just watch it to discover new positions...I have two things to say to them.
1. Use the Kama Sutra.
2. It's more fun exploring each other than making expectations of each other.
Tangent aside. Porn censorship in schools is one thing, but SafetyNet takes it too far.
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Family safety
I'm the CEO of MetaCert and we've classified over 630 million pages of pornography to help companies implement new and better controls to ensure that sites shouldn't be blocked, aren't blocked. The real problem is that existing systems block way too many sites that they shouldn't. What's more, all our consumer products are free - so this isn't a sales pitch.
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Re: Family safety
You don't see the problem that comes from that even beyond the possibility of mandated interference with protected speech as collateral damage?
(not trying to call you an evil schemer, just looking at things from the position of a user instead of a seller)
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Re: simpler solution
.......Just ban Children, then they will be 100% safe
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Kid's
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Re: Kid's
As for filtering "to protect the children", it's already there - it's called education about what porn really is and responsible parenting - and it's a damn site more likely to be effective than any software, which has been pretty much proved by, oh only EVERY filter and DRM package ever.
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Re: Re: Kid's
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Re: Kid's
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Fact is, children are as interested in there body's and why things feel good as we where, they will explorer it with or without naughty images.
Its called human nature, growing up and maturing....seems like this group wants to keep kids kids until they say otherwise.
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aint this nice
I said well let me ask you, if you were in a closed garage with a smoker for an hour or a car, which was more harmful..
he stopped talking to me after that for some odd reason......
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Pornography, uk censorship
Why are they making it harder for us to organise a revolution? /s
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I hate censorship
Hmmm their few nudes made up of ASCII characters are so hardcore, not. I would class that at about 5% of what anyone can see daily on page 3 of The Sun.
Beyond their crazy blocking of weird sites there was also a vast array of much more child inappropriate sites they did not block.
Well if they are serious on content filtering then that makes for another group of people who need to learn to use a VPN service. Just remember those school kids are quick learners and are often great with technology.
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School pornography
Now unsurprisingly, my school subscribed to the local council's internet filtering effort, so if you tried to look at anything interesting and non-educational, you were soundly rebuffed and redirected back to the safe parts of the internet. Except for the fact it wasn't a terribly good filter and was probably operating off a blacklist or something because there were a number of websites were not blocked, including a number of pornographic ones.
Now this is the bit where it gets interesting, because when you filter the internet, you go for all the obvious stuff, the softcore, the tamer hardcore, the normal stuff. The stuff I found, which fell through the net, was the abnormal stuff: BDSM, female domination, scatology, and other stuff that people /really/ don't want kids looking at (and to be honest stuff, I probably didn't want to look at, but did as a way of sticking it to the man), and it was only because this was the stuff that was available that I encountered it.
As I 10 year old, I would probably have been content with a few pictures involving nipples and maybe a penis, and not gone any further, but because that was denied me, I ended up finding the more unpleasant stuff. And I think that is the problem with draconian measures such as this, not only does it usually not work as intended, it might even make things worse than they already are, and that's the way I see this going.
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Censorship by another name
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Idiots...
All women liked to be tied up and fucked abusively hard and there is a secret war going on all around us between transforming machines from another planet.
...get real people. The idiots that think that shit is real have much bigger problems than not being able to function in intimate relationships...
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