Founder of Exodus Cry, Benjamin Nolot, wrote the following article in August 2021, marking the start of our Protect Children Not Porn campaign. This article was published on August 12, 2021 by the New York Post. You can read the original article here.
Eight-year-old Caleb grabbed Mom’s phone while she was chatting with friends. He did a few curious Google searches, which quickly brought up images of naked women’s backsides. Within seconds, he was on Pornhub.
As Caleb’s mom recalled in an interview with my organization, “I instantly felt like I needed to throw up once I saw the videos he had viewed. . . . I had never seen such graphic and violent content.”
Stories like this were once rare. But in today’s Internet-saturated and pornographized society, they’re ubiquitous. Children worldwide are a few clicks away from the most graphic and degrading sex acts imaginable. It’s a social crisis of behemoth proportions, but it isn’t one without a solution: requiring a credible age-verification mechanism on all sites hosting porn.
Already at the dawn of the last decade, nine of 10 American boys were encountering porn before turning 18, according to a University of New Hampshire study. The trend has only accelerated since. Today, the average age of porn exposure is 11. Per a recent Indiana University study in the Journal of Health Communication, 84 percent of males and 57 percent of females ages 14 to 18 in the United States have been exposed.
Other researchers have concluded that children under 10 now account for 10 percent of traffic on porn sites. For a site like Pornhub, which boasted 42 billion visits in 2019, that could mean 4.2 billion visits from kids who haven’t hit fifth grade.
What are they seeing? Scenes depicting child sexual abuse (simulated and sometimes real), incest and gang rape are easy to find. Sometimes, the porn itself is real-world sexual criminality captured on digital video. With very little regulation on so-called tube sites, where users can upload whatever they want, it’s nearly impossible to tell which videos aren’t criminal. Because of this very problem, after a surge of public pressure, Pornhub recently deleted 80 percent of its content, or about 10 million videos.
Underage porn exposure has devastating consequences. For children, it can lead to self-isolation from family and peers, as well as increased levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. A study in Sweden showed that about 70 percent of high-school boys who were frequent viewers of porn reported that the footage made them want to try out what they had seen.
A realistic solution is to require age verification. Porn companies are doing almost nothing to protect kids from accessing their content. With no age restrictions on most sites, it seems obvious that these smut peddlers don’t mind kids having an all-access pass to videos of the most deviant sexual scenarios imaginable.
It’s time for a policy solution.
Several countries have enacted legislation that calls for some form of age verification before users can access explicit content. Germany recently announced that Pornhub and three other porn tube sites will be shut down in the country for ignoring a mandate to implement child-protection procedures. Canada, Australia, Britain and France have all begun working toward online age verification. If the United States cares about our children, we must push for required age verification on all sites with adult content.
Opponents of such measures insist that the most determined young porn users will get around them anyway, but that’s making the perfect an enemy of the good. Yes, some young users will get around the restrictions, but if the measures can reduce the overall volume of child exposure by half or even a third, they’ll be worth the imposition on adults.
There’s no serious civil-libertarian argument against age verification for online porn. The old, brick-and-mortar adult shops were required to enforce age restrictions; ditto for brick-and-mortar strip clubs. So why shouldn’t similar restrictions apply to sites peddling content far more hardcore than anything those old-school smut peddlers offered?
The rest of the developed world is waking up to the social crisis of child porn exposure and embracing the obvious solution. America must, too.
Sign the petition requiring age verification, with government ID, on all sites hosting pornographic content.
To learn more about the ways pornography has become the new sex education for children and the dangerous lifelong implications of this global phenomenon, watch Raised on Porn for free on YouTube.
