WoLF Submits Testimony on Alaska Bill To Prohibt Porn Access To Minors
SUPPORT for AK HB254 PROHIBIT PORNOGRAPHY TO MINORS.
Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) is pleased to have the opportunity to submit written testimony in support of AK HB254. This bill provides mechanisms to protect children and adolescents from unnecessary exposure and access to porn, which can have deleterious effects on young children.
It should be of note that for ages, access to porn has been age-restricted. Anyone seeking to buy a magazine containing pornography must be over 18. You can be asked to provide ID to prove that you’re an adult. Similarly, you cannot enter bars where women or men will be stripping until nude unless you’re an adult. You also can’t rent or buy movies or enter most shops selling sexual merchandise, such as vibrators, unless you’re an adult.
Why, then, should accessing porn on the internet be any different?
And yet, it’s freely and ubiquitously available to minors across a myriad of sites.
HB254 takes a reasonable approach in seeking to establish there is liability for publishing or distributing porn to minors on the internet. The Women’s Liberation Front supports this approach.
The harms of porn exposure to minors are well documented. UNICEF has said,
“Exposure to pornography at a young age may lead to poor mental health, sexism and objectification, sexual violence, and other negative outcomes. Among other risks, when children view pornography that portrays abusive and misogynistic acts, they may come to view such behaviour as normal and acceptable.”
UNICEF is alarmed by the massive quantity of pornography available online, including increasingly graphic and extreme content that is easily accessible to children of all ages. Efforts to regulate content and restrict children’s access to pornography have not kept pace with technological shifts that have profoundly altered the landscape for the consumption of pornography. While many jurisdictions have effectively restricted children’s access to pornography in non-digital media, including by making it illegal to distribute pornography to children or knowingly expose them to it, efforts to do the same in digital environments have not been effective.
UNICEF supports the efforts of governments to ensure that children are protected from harmful content in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the authoritative guidance from the Committee on the Rights of the Child.
The American College of Pediatricians said,
“The availability and use of pornography has become almost ubiquitous among adults and adolescents. Consumption of pornography is associated with many negative emotional, psychological, and physical health outcomes. These include increased rates of depression, anxiety, acting out and violent behavior, younger age of sexual debut, sexual promiscuity, increased risk of teen pregnancy, and a distorted view of relationships between men and women. For adults, pornography results in an increased likelihood of divorce which is also harmful to children. “
Porn exposure has been linked the rise in youth seeking to ‘transition’ from one sex to another, particularly girls. The reasons for this are appalling. When young girls see porn imagery, and feel they’re being taught that women are treated violently, the reaction is to try to opt out of being female. Some get radical mastectomies and become ‘they’ to escape womanhood. Testimony from such a young woman, Chloe Cole, is heartbreaking. She started transitioning at 12, with a double mastectomy at 15. Now, at 21, she is a strong advocate against this, and has detransitioned back to a female. In her interview with Jordan Peterson in 2023, she admitted that addiction to porn, while on testosterone, was a huge harm to her.
It’s long been documented that children’s brains are not finished forming fully until about the age of 25. The last stage of formation is socialization – the brain requires intense socialization to finish forming its neurological conditions. If the socialization children and minors are receiving is heavily laden with porn, the social roles they are being taught are far outside societal norms. Porn may also have a stronger effect on children because they will mirror behaviors as part of their brain’s ongoing development. While an adult might not mirror what they see in porn in the outside world, youth lack such social filters. To them, what they see in media is concrete, real. They will use it in modeling their own behavior socially. This would be a terrible outcome.
We don’t need to speculate whether young children are being exposed unwillingly to pornography. Pop star Billie Eilish publicly admitted that porn exposure at age 11 really ‘messed me up.’
“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive.
The American Bar Association discusses the harms of porn on their website, and one harm that they, and we, would highlight, is that porn promotes aggression towards women.
“Pornography is arguably more sexist and hostile towards women than other sexual images in the media.11 The aggression and violence towards women found in much of today’s popular pornography can teach boys and young men that it is socially acceptable, and even desirable, to behave aggressively towards and demean women.
Pornography also portrays people and sexual relationships that do not accurately reflect how real people look and act and behave in intimate relationships. Unrealistic expectations of intimate partners may impede youths’ ability to build and maintain healthy relationships.
A 2009 analysis of studies on pornography and violence towards women reveals a significant relationship between pornography consumption and attitudes supporting violence towards women.18 The relationship is much stronger for violent as compared to nonviolent pornography.19 A 2001-2004 survey of middle and high school youth found 76% of boys who reported committing some form of sexual harassment also reported use of sexually explicit media.20”
The Women’s Liberation Front is committed to ending male violence against women. There is a clear nexus between pornography and violence against women. Allowing young people to have these images pushed on them, without restraint, contributes to poor emotional development, inability to form and conduct relationships with the opposite sex, and increased violence against women and girls.
New Mexico’s attorney general is presently suing Meta for indiscriminately serving porn to minors, and targeting them for prostitution and sexual assault.
Laws like HB254 have been passed in other states, notably Louisiana, the first to put such a bill forward. Pornhub, the leading distributor of porn videos in the United States, and the 10th most visited website in the world, according to the New York Times, noticed an 80% reduction in traffic from Louisiana immediately after passage. It should be noted that Pornhub is a known distributor of rape videos and human trafficking videos, where the participants are not willing. Victims have pleaded with the site to take down their videos, which continue to victimize them, but Pornhub does not respond. From a 2020 New York Times article written by Nicholas Kristof:
“Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”
Pornhub is suing Louisiana, Texas, and Utah, through their proxy the Free Speech Coalition, to stop these laws. They’ve blocked access to their site from states like Arkansas that have passed similar bans. The reason traffic drops so severely when these laws pass is because men don’t want anyone to know that they’re viewing porn. They want to access these violent images anonymously. That’s why they challenge these laws.
But in reducing the harms to children and minors, laws like AB254 are ideal. Men have to show ID to get into a strip club or buy a porn magazine. We don’t feel that asking them to prove they’re adults on the internet is in any way too large of a burden to access materials that include rapes, violence to women, and sexual violence towards children.
Thank you for reviewing our written testimony. We support AK HB 254, and we are available and willing to discuss these important, complicated issues with you. We welcome your questions and we are happy to serve as a resource for you.
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