Experiment in non censorship noted

The New York Times had an article  on the weekend looking at the question of what is known about the effect of internet pornography on teenagers.

The answer proposed is:  not much.

This is not surprising.  As the article says, it's not as if you can easily get ethical consent to do studies that compare one set of teenagers deliberately exposed to certain types of pornography with those who are not exposed.  And, for those who have seen some pornography, proving causal connections is particularly difficult:

After sifting through those papers, the report found a link between exposure to pornography and engagement in risky behavior, such as unprotected sex or sex at a young age. But little could be said about that link. Most important, “causal relationships” between pornography and risky behavior “could not be established,” the report concluded. Given the ease with which teenagers can find Internet pornography, it’s no surprise that those engaging in risky behavior have viewed pornography online. Just about every teenager has. So blaming X-rated images for risky behavior may be like concluding that cars are a leading cause of arson, because so many arsonists drive. 

American scholars have come to nearly identical nonconclusions. “By the end we looked at 40 to 50 studies,” said Eric Owens, an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and co-author of “The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research,” published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. “And it became, ‘O.K., this one tells us A, this one tells us B.’ To some degree we threw up our hands and said, there is no conclusion to be drawn here.”

This is one of those areas where, regardless of the difficulty of drawing causal connections, there is good reason to take a common sense approach that limits on the amount of pornography available to teenagers be limited.  The availability of hard core pornography via the internet in virtually every teenager's house is a novel situation we have never really seen the likes of before.  It is not the equivalent of soft core Playboys being found in a secret stash.   And video and photography of real people engaged in the real activity is also rather different from fictional, written accounts - the latter is an act of imagination that everyone knows has not involved a real person using their body in a morally dubious fashion.

Thus, I have never had a problem at all with the idea that the "standard" household feed of internet access should make some attempt at filtering out what would be called x rated video and photographic pornography, even if it is a certainty that what's left will never be as "safe" as Reader's Digest, with an "opt in" choice to be made by those who want it.   Australian internet companies and libertarian types have always claimed that this was virtually impossible to achieve for technical reasons. Yet, as the NYT article points out:

Starting late last year, Internet service providers in Britain made “family-friendly filters,” which block X-rated websites, the default for customers. Now any account holder who wants to view adult material needs to actively opt in — effectively raising a hand to say, “Bring on the naughty.”

The initiative, which was conceived and very publicly promoted by the government, is intended to prevent what Prime Minister David Cameron called the corrosion of childhood, which, he argued in a speech last year, happens when kids are exposed to pornography at a young age.

Tech commentators who are against any form of filtering always argue that a determined teenager will be able to get around it.  That hardly seems the point when one is considering children under 13, who are not likely to be highly motivated to searching out pornography anyway. And even for your normal teenager, the (shall we say) low threshold for arousal probably means that we can acknowledge that the filtered feed may have enough material for their, ahem, purposes; but this is still better than full unlimited access to a world of demeaning examples of sexual activity. 

I am sure that it would be widely considered a bad thing if (hypothetically) all laws regarding access to adult shops were revoked and newsagents and bookshops were suddenly to open vast sections devoted to the most lurid and explicit DVDs and magazine covers, and could hand out sample copies to 14 year olds.  Why is reasonable, age related regulation of access to the physical thing accepted, but the cyber version is supposed to be completely open or it's painted as some sort of censorship crisis?    Opt in plans do nothing to prevent adults accessing what they want to access.

So, I am very interested to see how the English new scheme works out.  There is remarkably little comment on the internet about it, even though it has now been in place for a few months.   I would thought that it had caused some massive log jam on the net, we would have heard already.

If it works reasonably well, it should be taken up elsewhere too.