Quebec independent Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is calling for a crackdown on youth consumption of online pornography through new legislation that would force porn sites to verify the ages of all users.
Miville-Dechêne has introduced a bill, S-203, that would make porn sites such as the Canadian PornHub – a video-sharing site with adult content – criminally liable for failing to verify a user’s age before browsing.
Miville-Dechêne, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018, said children and teens should be protected from graphics that she said could pollute their minds, and blocking access by law is the best way to do this. to do.
“If you’re a minor, you can’t see a movie when it’s 18 and over. If you’re a minor, you can’t buy Playboy. But if you’re a minor, you have full, unobstructed access without any kind of barrier to 4,” 5 million porn sites around the world, “Miville-Dechêne told CBC News.
“I’m not on a crusade against porn. I just want to protect kids from porn that is widely shown on these websites, but not the soft kind of thing at all.
The senator alleges that porn disrupts the meaning of sex to its consumers, depicts women as objects for use and abuse by their partners, and promotes physical aggression through the manifold depictions of spanking, choking, gagging and hair pulling.
‘A fantasy world where women are abused’
“It’s a fantasy world where women are being abused. It gives both sexes a distorted view of what sexuality is,” she said.
Miville-Dechêne said a study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that adolescents who consume violent pornography are six times more likely to be sexually aggressive than those who use non-violent pornography or no pornography at all.
She also pointed to Australian research suggesting that frequent youth pornography use can lead to ‘compulsive consumption’ – such as addiction – unrealistic expectations about sexual experiences, fear and anxiety, problems with self-esteem and a distorted view of what their bodies should be to do. looks like.
Marilyn Evans, an Ontario woman who started the Parents Aware organization in 2016 to combat porn consumption among young people, supports Miville-Dechêne’s bill.
“Children end up on these sites where they find extreme, violent and often illegal sexualized content. It is dangerous and irresponsible for Canada not to use age verification,” she said.
Porn consumption soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as social restrictions forced more people online to engage in sexual activity.
PornHub has reported that traffic to its site has increased 23 percent since the start of the pandemic-related lockdowns, with more than 100 million daily visits to the site on any given day. The Montreal-based site is one of the most prolific in the world, averaging over 100 billion video views per year.
While there isn’t much data on Canadian porn viewing habits, Miville-Dechêne said it is well known that a significant number of those porn consumers are young people.
“What kind of society do we want to be?”
Miville-Dechêne, a former journalist, pointed to a 2014 study by Media Smarts of Ottawa that suggested that 40 percent of all high school boys have seen porn online, 28 percent watch it at least once a day or once a week to. and 7 percent of girls say they watched porn.
“What kind of society do we want to be? The average age of encountering pornography is eleven years old. That’s quite young,” she said.
The bill would make it a criminal offense to make sexually explicit material available on the Internet to a minor.
A first offense would be punished with a fine of no more than $ 10,000 for an individual and $ 250,000 for a company. Fines for subsequent offenses would be more significant.
MindGeek, the Canadian company that owns PornHub – and other major streaming sites such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Mofos, Reality Kings, Sean Cody and WhyNotBi.com – did not respond to requests for comment on the new legislation.
While the bill itself doesn’t dictate how these sites should verify the age of their users – if passed, it’s up to the federal cabinet to enact regulations – Miville-Dechêne said there are a number of third-party companies offering verification services.
The current standard for most sites – an honor-based system where users click a box to confirm they are over 18 – is a low barrier to entry that can easily be ignored, she said.
Let’s be honest about this. This is a joke, ”she said.
Yoti, a UK company, checks ID cards and then issues a certified age “token” for a user’s browser. Another option would be to implement a “porn pass”, which would be sold in stores that personally check a buyer’s age.
“I’m concerned about a third party’s use of private information, but when people say that to me, I say, ‘It’s already being used to gamble online, to buy alcohol. Why should porn be any different? “, She said. .
“We want to make sure that minors don’t have access and that’s clearly the only way. It’s not a high price to protect from overexposure.”
Brenda Cossman is a professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Mark S. Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies. She is also the co-author of the book Bad Attitude To Trial: Pornography, Feminism, And The Butler’s Decision, an investigation of feminist advocacy against pornography.
She said accounts like this are reviving a decades-old debate within feminism about the place of pornography – and going too far in controlling sexual expression.
“Pornography has long been targeted because it is somehow linked to violence against women. That has been debunked. There is actually no evidence of a causal link between viewing pornography and increased harassment or violent attitudes towards women. she told CBC News.
‘Here we are again, choosing sex’
Cossman said that since the obscenity laws in Britain in the 1850s, lawmakers have tried to portray sex as something that would corrupt and corrupt young people and women.
“Here we are again, choosing sex. We feel that sex is somehow uniquely harmful than watching incredibly violent, bloody horror stuff and all the video games kids play. But, Oh yes, sex isn’t. Now there’s the problem, “she said.
“I don’t think looking at sexually explicit material is better or worse than looking at a whole host of things. Re-living this debate that access to pornography is somehow harmful to women and children just seems like something. from a bygone era. “
Cossman said huge online porn traffic figures show just how integral porn is to the everyday lives of millions of people.
And if lawmakers are concerned about young people accessing explicit material, there are other ways to limit access, Cossman said. She said she thinks it is too harsh to turn to the Criminal Code to police sexually explicit material.
Miville-Dechêne said she’s not interested in shutting down porn sites completely – she just wants them to be the exclusive domain of adults. She said such measures are already being pursued in Europe.
In Germany, the government is ready to make it mandatory for ISPs to block access to the most popular foreign porn sites if those sites refuse to implement effective age verification systems.
In July, France passed a law with new criminal penalties for porn websites that do not apply strict age verification systems. Administrators can face up to three years in prison and a fine of $ 75,000 for failing to comply.
“I have to recognize that this is a controversial area, and too many people are inclined to believe that this is a purely conservative issue. In my opinion, this could be a cross-party issue as it is about protecting children,” said Miville- Dechêne.
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