More than 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences in England and Wales. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, doctors, TV presenters. And the numbers are rising every year. How did this happen?
More than 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences in England and Wales. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, doctors, TV presenters. And the numbers are rising every year. How did this happen?
This article is super thorough which I appreciate. I will say, though, it feels a bit biased towards two concepts:
I can understand that some people might be getting more extreme content in order to fulfill the dopamine hit. But most of these men went onto chatrooms and requested CP. That’s a big leap to go from “18+ teen” porn on Pornhub and then hop into a chatroom on some other site to seek out underage porn. It’s not like Pornhub pushed them into that chatroom or even - as far as I understand - offered a chatroom.
I also don’t see how age verification will do anything to stop this. The article seemed a bit tech illiterate. The whole point of illegal forms of porn is that they’re illegal. They’re hosted on the darkweb or shared behind forums and chatrooms. They’re not hosted (I think) on platforms like Pornhub. So how does age verification resolve this issue if the illegal websites won’t comply? Not to mention, now the only legal sources of porn are behind some form of ID restriction which is going to make a lot of people who want to remain anonymous seek out alternative websites.
I don’t believe Pornhub has likely been entirely innocent. Any website which allows users to upload media experiences this kind of corruption. I’m sure Google Drive has had countless zip folders of questionable material uploaded to it. As has, probably, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and - yes - Lemmy instances. What are we going to do? Require people use a driver’s license for every online account so we can track who is uploading the illegal content? Who is responsible for validating IDs in that situation? Is a UK ID valid for a website hosted in the US?
As for the last section related to children seeking out content of teens their own age, I think age verification makes more sense there. But, again, it would require some massive overhaul of centralized IDs and tracking people across the web to stop it. It would effectively end the web as we know it.
It seems like - to me - the best thing we can do is educate people on why some porn is ok and why other porn is not. I think we should encourage others to report the illegal stuff when they see it. I just don’t think age verification will be effective. It’ll either work and make the internet inaccessible. Or it’ll be easy to bypass and just make everything less usable.
Oh, jeez. I hadn’t connected those dots until this moment. Of course you’re right — age verification laws will increase the circulation of child porn.