Minors and the problem of Internet pornography regulaton

I. The Problem—Minors’ Access to Internet Pornography

1. According to a 1999 TIME /CNN teen poll, 44% of teens ages 13 to 17 said they had “seen websites that are X-rated or have sexual content.” [TIME, 5/10/99]



2. According to a 1999 Yankelovich poll, 58% of teens ages 13 to 17 said they visited websites “containing pornography, offensive music lyrics, gambling or messages of violence and hate” ("Teens Unseemly Web Visits," Newsday, 9/7/99). Among teens with lower grades (C average or less) or poor attendance, the percentage rose to 78%.



3. According to a June 2001 Pew Internet & American Life survey, 15% of online teens ages 12 to 17 “say they have lied about their age to gain access to a Web site—an action that is often required in gaining access to pornographic sites. A fifth of all boys (19%) ages 12 to 17 have done this, compared to 11% of teen girls. One quarter of boys ages 15 to 17 have said they were older than they are in order to gain access to a Web site. Teens with several years of Internet experience are more likely…to have lied about their age to gain access to a Web site.”



4. According to a December 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation study, 70% of teens ages 15-17 had "accidentally come across" pornography while on the Internet. Of these teens, 55% said "being exposed to pornography would have a serious impact on kids under 18."



5. According to February 2002 Nielsen/NetRatings, “nearly 16% of visitors to adult-oriented Web sites were under the age of 18.” [This statistic was reported in Youth, Pornography and the Internet, published by the National Research Council, at subsection 3.3, May 2002.]



6. According to a 2002 Girl Scout Research Institute survey, “most girls (ages 13 to 18) say they can get around parents’ rules…Nearly half say they’re able to…get into a porn site (42%)” [USA TODAY, 2/13/02]. According to an article about the same study published in the New York Daily News (3/3/02), “the girls report they also get unsolicited e-mails with porn links and often accidentally go to porn sites when looking for legitimate teen sites.”



7. According to study published in the March 2003 Youth and Society (conducted by researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center), in the course of a year 25% of children ages 10-17 who use the Internet regularly are exposed involuntarily to pornography (defined to include only pictorial material). According to survey report, “24% of youth said they very or extremely upset by the exposure…Twenty-one percent also said they were very or extremely embarrassed.”



8. According to an Australian study released March 2003, 84% of boys ages 16 and 17 and 60% of girls ages 16 and 17 had “stumbled on” Internet sex sites and 38% of the boys “admit to having deliberately searched the Internet for pornography” (Sydney Morning Herald, 3/3/03). The article noted further that “about 5 percent of the Australian teenage boys admitted to having watched Internet porn or X-rated videos every week; 20% every two or three months.”



9. According to a Spring 2003 survey conducted online for Symantec Corp., “more than 80% of children (ages 7 to 18) surveyed receive inappropriate spam on a daily basis…[H]alf of the kids surveyed reported feeling uncomfortable and offended when seeing improper email content.”



10. According to figures released in March 2003 by Morality in Media, between March 11, 2003 and March 10, 2004, 41% of the complaints submitted to MIM’s obscenitycrimes.org Web site that indicated receipt of porn spam, were checked, “My child was (or easily could have been) exposed to the porn spam.”

II. The Problem—What minors see when they visit in Internet porn sites

1. Last year, I spoke with a mother who caught her pre-teen son using the family computer—stationed in a common area—to access porn sites. Having looked at some of the sites he visited, the mother said, “I was naïve about the Internet; I thought you had to pay for pornography.”



2. The mother’s discovery is supported by a survey described in the report Youth, Pornography and the Internet (National Research Council, at subsection 3.3, May 2002), “In a survey of adult-oriented commercial sites, the majority of adult-oriented sites (about 74%) were found to display adult content on the first page (accessible to anyone who visits the page, often through the display of sexually explicit banner ads to other sites…about 25 percent employed practices that hindered the user from leaving the site (e.g., mousetrapping) and only 3 percent required a credit card or other ‘adult check’ to proceed past the first page of the site (that is, most sites allow the user to take a ‘free preview’ in which some additional content is provided.”



3. The survey reported in Youth, Pornography and the Internet is supported by the experience of two retired law enforcement agents who follow up on complaints submitted to MIM’s ObscenityCrimes.org Web site. Most of the complaints are the result of porn spam. A very large majority (“almost all”) of the porn sites they observe depict explicit sex free of charge.

III. The Problem—Sexual addiction, sex miseducation, sexual assault

A. Sexual addiction

1. Here’s how Dr. Victor B. Cline, a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah, describes the phenomenon (letter, September 28, 1996):

   “I have been concerned about my porn addict patients who use the Internet to access pornography to feed their addiction/illness. I have boys in their early teens getting into that stuff with really disastrous consequences. They tell me they actively search for porn on the Internet keying in such words as sex, nudity, pornography, obscenity, etc. Once they have found how to access it they go back again and again—just like drug addicts.”

2. Here is what the Jane Brody reports in her New York Times article, “Cybersex Gives Birth to a Psychological Disorder” (5/16/2000), about the addiction problem:

   “Researchers writing in…the Journal of Sex Addiction and Compulsivity report that many of the men and women who now spend dozens of hours each week seeking stimulation from their computers deny that they have a problem and refuse to seek help until their marriages, their jobs, or both, are in jeopardy”
   
   “[S]aid Dr. Mark Schwartz of the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis, ‘Sex on the Net is like heroin…It grabs them and takes over their lives. And it’s very difficult to treat because the people affected don’t want to give it up’…Dr. Al Cooper, a staff psychologist at Stanford who has conducted the largest and most detailed survey of online sex, calls the Net ‘the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity.’
   
   “To those who say a behavioral compulsion is not a true addiction, Dr. [Jennifer] Schneider [an associate editor of the Journal of Sex Addiction and Compulsivity] responded with a definition of addiction that would clearly apply to cybersex abusers: ‘Loss of control, continuation of the behavior despite adverse consequences and preoccupation or obsession with obtaining the drug or pursuing the behavior.’

B. Sex miseducation

1. Here’s how Dr. Mary Anne Layden, Director of Education, Center for Cognitive Therapy, at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the problem:

   “The messages of Internet pornography are psychologically toxic, untrue, difficult to undo and are shaped by individuals whose goals are to make money without concern for the consequences. You wouldn’t allow the drug pusher on the corner to come into your home, school or library and teach your child about medication. Why would you allow the sex pusher on the Internet to come into your home school or library and educate your child about sexuality? We owe it to our youth to give them the best, protect them from the worst, and to use our wisdom, education and experience to decide which is which.”




2. In his article, Pornography’s Effects on Adults and Children, Dr. Victor B. Cline observes:

   “[S]ex counseling clinics in the United States daily make use of explicit sexual pictures, films, books and videos to change couple’s sexual behavior, beliefs and attitudes. Other centers use graphic sex films in an attempt to recondition the sexual behavior of sex offenders. However, these are carefully selected and prescribed as a physician would in writing a prescription for a particular drug to treat a specific illness or infection. . . . [N]o responsible sex therapist would ever say to a patient who had a specifically focused sexual problem, ‘Go down to the adult bookstore and help yourself to anything you can find there.
   
   “You cannot logically argue that the kind of change which takes place in a sex counseling clinic can function only one way (just to make people healthy). The possibility certainly exists that some pornography can harm people through accidental conditioning processes or modeling or imitative learning of destructive, unhealthy, or illegal kinds of sexual activity, which some viewers may later act out.”

3. Even “adult” industry spokespersons agree that we learn things from watching porn: As reported in Adult Video News (Sept. 1999), Sharon Mitchell, director of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, said:

   “Everyone who watches porn learns something from it, right? It could be a new technique…even a new kind of fantasy. Right?”

   In an editorial, “The Importance of Porn…” (AVN, Mar. 2002), Heidi Pike-Johnson writes:

   “Porn…inspires us to reach out and try things that we had never done before. It challenges us to live up to our desires…”

C. Sexual assault

1. “Teenagers open up to Dr. [Lynn] Ponton, a professor of psychiatry at University of California at San Francisco. In addition, as chairwoman of the Disaster and Trauma Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, she works as a consultant to schools on issues of violence and risk taking…

   “Q. A disturbing finding of the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey last year is that one in five high school girls has been physically or sexually abused by her boyfriend…Why is this happening? A. We’re in a culture where violence is layered over everything…So many of the sexual and violent images on the Internet and in other media use girls in objectified and sadistic way.
   
   Q. How do gender roles fuel teenage sexual violence? A. …I see boys who are addicted to sex sites on the Internet that show sadistic behavior toward women. It affects those boys sexual lives and also what we see with our daughters.” ["An Expert's Eye on Teenage Sex, Risk and Abuse," New York Times, 1/15/2002]

2. “A Canberra (Australia)-based health unit working with abused and abusive children has recorded a significant rise in the number of children aged younger than 10 who are committing sexual offenses, including ‘oral sex and forced intercourse,’ against other children. . . . ‘We’re not talking about kids playing mummies and daddies together,’ [the unit manager Annabel] Wyndham said in a phone interview. ‘We’re talking about things like one child holding another child up by the neck . . . and pulling their pants down and doing things to them.’ Most of the children seen in this category came from troubled backgrounds, and 40 percent had been abused themselves. . . . Nonetheless, the unit also recorded startling data relating to Internet use. Of the . . . sexually-abusive children seen . . . 90 percent admitted having seen sexually explicit material online, the report said. A full one-quarter deliberately sought out pornography online as their main use of the Internet, while about 40 percent said they used the Internet for other purposes as well as accessing pornography. . . . Wyndham said her unit did not believe the rise in cases of children behaving in a sexually aggressive manner was merely a matter of increased recognition of a longstanding problem…The research paper was presented by the Canberra unit and a government-funded body called the National Child Protection Clearinghouse. One of its child protection experts, Dr. Janet Stanley, said…’We’re suggesting there’s an association between children’s exposure to inappropriate material on the Internet . . . and their acting out in sexually aggressive behavior, experimenting and modeling what they are seeing.’” [“Online Porn Driving Sexually Aggressive Children,” CNSNews.com, 11/26/03]