Any thoughts on the porn ban?

[Lula1998]

Hate the Tories but I think this is the one thing they've done that I agree with. I know kids can get round it with VPNs etc, but some of the younger ones won't. Porn is a cancer imo.

Reading through some of these replies it comes across as tho' some don't want any restrictions to be put in place.

If we wanted to do something about it I think we could but I think nobody gives a fuck. Just like the prostitution.

If we wanted to do something about it I think we could but I think nobody gives a fuck.

Yawn. No, what people are saying is that restrictions will not work.

And yes, we could do something about it, but that involves educating children as I suggested above, not introducing measures which will actually make things worse.

Parents need to stop giving their children devices which can access the internet.

Good luck with that.

MockerstheFeManist

They could if they wanted to. I did. It wasn't popular but it wasn't my job to be popular. I worked in tech at the time, almost every parent I worked with did the same. It was mobiles for calls and texts (and then only from secondary school age), and tablets, pcs, laptops were only allowed in main rooms. And the knowledge that your parents knew how those devices worked better than you did. Plus, I would actually speak to my children about what constituted healthy relationships.

The problem is all the other parents who claim ignorance of technology then hand over hundreds of pound worth of technology without putting any restraints in place.

It's no coincidence that we have a generation of young people who mirror what they have seen in porn. That is down to lax parenting. And I realise I'll be jumped on for saying that, but meh.

Its like trying to tackle the evils of drink driving by introducing prohibition. Drink driving was reduced because we managed to make it socially unacceptable to drink and drive, and made it socially acceptable to be the designated driver.

Porn and prostitution are driven by entitlement and misogyny. This govt has no will to tackle misogyny and there is no effective, well informed opposition.

Add to this the fact that a generation has been raised to believe they are entitled to the internet; half the population don't want to learn how to manage tech and the other half are motivated to learn so they can bypass any restrictions.

The porn ban is going to fail, and the only way the govt can deal with the result is to force the ISP's to monitor what they deliver.
So imo, their long term plan is to go the Chinese route and have a State controlled internet.

I went through an exercise where I deliberately tried to block all porn from getting into my house. Not that I'm against porn, but I wanted to see if it was possible.

This included setting up a blocking proxy server using constantly updating blacklists, reconfiguring my DNS to use family friendly name resolution, forcing google and bing to always turn on safe search, etc. I tried to be as comprehensive as I could, and I am very IT literate.

I failed.

In order for this to work you have to whitelist every site you want to access - this is impossible to do, plus they would have to ban VPNs at the same time.

Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, duckduckgo were some of the most obvious routes to porn. I'm sure there a literally millions of others. Then there is the TOR and the dark web, and I definitely don't want my kids to go there.

This plan is stupid and impossible and should be scrapped immediately. Education and pro-active parenting is the key.

Also, if your children have smartphones then all bets are off.

Regardless, it's not the porn that I'm unduly worried about - it's the violence that I want stopped. I chose to try and block porn because that is what this government is obsessed with.

If it would actually bloody work, I would be for anything that lessened the amount of kids having access to violent porn. However, children/teens today are so much more tech savvy than us (generally, of course some adults know what they are doing 100% too!) so..they will get round it easily. I mean, this is embarassing but my laptop started going dodgy as hell a few days back and I was googling to try and find out the problem and fix it for at least 2 hours, teen DSS walked in, asked whats wrong, had it sorted in a few seconds. IT frightens me sometimes, how much they know about technology compared to me. Yeah computers were around when I was growing up, we did get dial up before a lot of people because my dad worked in technology, but I did not understand any of it the way kids today seem to. I have a fast typing speed (many typos tho!) and thats it. I can just about understand torrents to download and how to go where I want. But anything else, not really.

My guess is that one of the most likely places for a child to first see porn (or even nonconsensual nudity) is on a classmate's phone. Even if the image or video isn't forwarded to your child's phone (because you refused to give DC a phone, or you give an old-school text-only brick, or you lock down everything on their smartphone) it will be shown to them on someone else's screen - the class bully, the class clown, the class attention-seeker. No amount of good parenting will prevent that scenario. How your DC respond to that: that is when your good parenting comes into play.

No amount of good parenting will prevent that scenario. How your DC respond to that: that is when your good parenting comes into play.

That's it - it's why you need a two-pronged approach of monitoring usage, and education.

It would be great if there was quick fix, but there really isn't. It's no different to any of the other things we have to educate children about - alcohol, road safety, healthy eating. Even if legislation works, it can only do so much, the rest is up to parents.

I went to a conference about this a few years ago. It was reiterated time and time again by American IT security the only way would be if it was a global thing. But the issue then involved local laws, which would be pointless as you can change your location.

I'd also say, it's not just porn. Parents who give their children unlimited access to the internet are also leaving them vulnerable to other nasty stuff, like grooming and bullying. They need to be educated about how to deal with that kind of stuff too before they are confronted with it.

Saskia

You sound like the sort of parent who could talk to your kids about this stuff and deal with any problems.

The ones who use tech as a free babysitter are not going to be so responsible, either through fecklessness and/or the stresses of their lives.

It will make little positive difference, any positive difference will be overshadowed by negative difference.
For every site willing to adopt these measures, there will be 100 less secure, less legal sites that feature less legal videos that won't add the measures.

Restrictions won't work. It's all bluster. The internet reacts to censorship by going round it - it was designed that way.

As for precautions in the home, I installed software to protect my DS from porn but they were shown porn by other children whose parents weren't so careful.

Governments can't eradicate porn. We have to educate our children about it, and before they go to secondary school.

TheInebriati hits the nail on the head:

Porn and prostitution are driven by entitlement and misogyny. This govt has no will to tackle misogyny and there is no effective, well informed opposition.

I'm with the posters who say it will just lead to complacency, people will assume the block actually blocks everything dodgy when it can't possibly hope to, leaving now children vulnerable to seeing some horrific stuff.

Better to spend time and money on educating childern and parents, except it's easier towns cheaper to just point at the ISPs and make it all their fault.

FWIW if there were a way to ban it outright with severe consequences for anyone caught viewing it I'd be totally on board. But we need to be realistic and not just settle for half arsed and misleading solutions

Can children easily access child pornography?

I (perhaps naively) thought that CP was very hard to view because well, restrictions.

If so, can't something similar be done with mainstream porn?

One small point - those people out there reading this who want to answer my genuine questions and concerns with the word yawn... I think you are pathetic. Could you ignore my posts in future?

FWIW if there were a way to ban it outright with severe consequences for anyone caught viewing it I'd be totally on board...

Me too.

HorsewithnoFrills

The thing with CP is there aren't many big named porn sites that will host it.

Eg, the company tasked with age verification in the UK is MindGeek. MindGeek will collect credit card details or passport numbers etc. MindGeek own Porn hub, Red Tube, youporn. They're a business and know CP would damage them and they're standing with UK gov and ultimately cost them money.

So once restrictions are in place for the business websites that won't host CP, that will leave websites that aren't bothered abut profit, that will host whatever and they'll all refuse new restrictions.

Ultimately, kids looking for porn won't see the curated business and for profit sites as they've got restrictions, they will see uncurated and illegal content, which could include cp, and is hosted by whoever with no age restriction barrier.

I think it's ridiculous because it will lead young teens to install VPNs and get tor... then they will be on the dark web where there are absolutely no filters and they can access anything from bestiality to child porn.

It's just a ploy to collect the data of adults. It's not actually going to protect the children it's supposed to protect.

I agree with pp saying it's actually going to make the situation much worse. Because its 'normal' porn that will be the most difficult to access. It wont make a difference to illegal or extreme pornography. So then you will have complacent parents think, great my child cant access porn I dont need to worry.... and of course it's going to make no difference to the fact kids hit puberty earlier and are interested in sex earlier... that society sexualises absolutely everything to make money... that kids will still have access to the internet in general and will make their own content that they can send to each other via encrypted messaging services... leaving them at greater risk than before...

Theres just no easy solution... its political pandering to pearl clutchers for votes...
Theres no shortcut to actual decent parenting... to facing the facts that you need to talk about sexuality and pornography with your children at a much younger age than you might have expected.. and to talk openly and honestly and for it to be an ongoing discussion... and to keep an eye on your childs general internet usage...

MonkeyToesOfDoom (great username btw)

For every site willing to adopt these measures

I don’t think anything is being done by the sites, all the filtering is being done by your isp via changes to dns that will redirect a request to {site}.com to an age verification page

I agree with all that's being said- especially about the type of porn being viewed more likely to be even more extreme than what is viewed now. It's simply a matter of time before primary school kids find out about vpn's and use them to get around blocks. My children knew how to circumvent school IT security by y8 (age 12-13) This sort of knowledge travels down the ages very fast.

The only way to sort this issue is if all countries agreed to ban it but that will never happen.

One small point - those people out there reading this who want to answer my genuine questions and concerns with the word yawn... I think you are pathetic. Could you ignore my posts in future?

I think it's pathetic to argue that people who are explaining in reasonable terms why blocks will not work 'don't want any restrictions to be put in place.' I have seen this argument trotted out on MN every single time this subject arises, always by someone who refuses to 'believe that nothing at all can be done'. So yes, I will yawn, because it's boring and pointless.

Only the main porn sites will be targeted and blocked if they don't comply...that leaves the even more dangerous porn sites the ones easiest to access.