Degrading behaviour towards women is common in ‘mainstream’ pornography, according to the eSafety commissioner. So, what impact is this having on adults and teens?<\/p>\n
A 2023 report by the Children’s Commissioner for England found 50 per cent of child sexual abuse cases carried out by another child, included language or acts resembling violent porn.<\/p>\n
According to the report, some children directly linked their harmful behaviour to what they had seen in porn, highlighting concerns that exposure is influencing real-life actions and distorting understanding of consent and healthy relationships.<\/p>\n
A 2022 study from the Journal of Research on Adolescence found adolescents who viewed pornography were more likely to later engage in sexual harassment.<\/p>\n
The link was stronger among boys and some evidence also connected pornography use to an increased likelihood of committing sexual assault.<\/p>\n
Pornography laws just like ‘walking into a pub’<\/p>\n
According to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, around 30 per cent of the country’s children stumble across pornography online by the time they’re 13.<\/p>\n
From March 9 next year, websites that have the highest risk of enabling children to access or be exposed to pornography will need to implement age assurance measures for people in Australia.<\/p>\n
That will be expanded to include search engine services from June 2027.<\/p>\n
It means people in Australia will likely have to verify their age when signing into profiles on web browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, before they can access adult sites.<\/p>\n
“These changes are not a big hindrance for adults if they do want to access certain content, in the same way that you walk into a pub or a bar you may be required to show ID,” Ms Swirsky said.<\/p>\n
“We appreciate that in order to access to alcohol for example, we need to prove we are an adult, so this is the same thing, it’s just being done online.”<\/p>\n
The new laws in the UK have been contentious among some groups, who have raised concerns about its impact on free speech, including Elon Musk.<\/p>\n
The Liberal Democrats \u2014 a centrist political party \u2014 have written to the UK’s Labour government calling for a parliamentary review into the laws, while a petition to repeal the legislation has received more than 500,000 signatures online.<\/p>\n
UK Media regulator, Ofcom, estimated in its 2023 report, that 14 million people in the country had accessed pornography online that year, which represented 29 per cent of adult internet users.<\/p>\n
Websites that ignore the new UK laws could be fined up to $36.5 million, or 10 per cent of their global revenue.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Adult websites introduced age-verification measures for people trying to access them from the UK in July. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
YouGov polling \u00a0found most of the UK public supported the new age verification measures.<\/p>\n
But while major pornography sites have implemented the age checks, some smaller websites have not.<\/p>\n
“As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites,” a spokesperson for PornHub said.<\/p>\n
PornHub’s average daily visits in the UK plummeted from 3.2 million before the laws were introduced to around 2 million after.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there has also been a surge in the use of apps that disguise a user’s location in the UK, since the introduction of the new laws.<\/p>\n
Ofcom said platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of Virtual private network apps (VPNs) to get around age checks.<\/p>\n
VPNs became the most downloaded on Apple’s App Store in the UK in the days after the age verification rules were enforced.<\/p>\n
“When the measures first came in, there was a rise in people downloading VPNs, but we don’t have evidence currently that it is children using VPNs,” Ms Swirsky said.<\/p>\n
“It’s likely that the majority of people who have downloaded VPNs are adults and they’re doing this to get around their age requirements, regardless there is friction which is making it harder for children to view a harmful content.”<\/p>\n
The Australian Government said a trial of its age assurance measures found geolocation technology can help detect when someone is trying to mask their real location through a VPN.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The number of people accessing prominent pornography websites in the United Kingdom has plummeted after new age-verification laws…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[31879,64,63,25494,44,119575,74853],"class_list":{"0":"post-188088","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"tag-age-verification","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-laws","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-pornhub","14":"tag-pornography"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}