Parents need help to protect their kids from online pornography

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to review in its next session the constitutionality of Texas’s age-verification law for pornographic websites. This and other states’ age-verification laws are critical for helping parents protect their children from pornography that is all too easily accessible online today, which is often violent and dehumanizing. 

The court has historically recognized that the government has a compelling interest in protecting children from pornography. Age-verification laws like Texas’s represent the most direct way to do that. Given the anonymous authentication methods now available, these laws are indeed constitutional. This is a pivotal moment, and the court must uphold the Texas law.

Many parents are well aware of the dangers of online pornography, so they invest the time, energy and money to set up filters on their children’s devices, on their family computers and even on their home wi-fi router.

But kids don’t need to go looking for pornography on the web. It finds them on social media.

Although parents can block adult websites and nudity from being accessed in a web browser, these filters don’t work inside of apps. When a child can get to PornHub in five clicks inside Snapchat, all without leaving the app, such filters become meaningless.

The Texas law, and age-verification laws passed so far in more than 10 other states, seeks to change this challenging dilemma for parents. Texas’s law requires websites that publish a certain amount of "sexual material harmful to minors" to verify that users attempting to access the site are at least 18 years old. 

Age-verification laws help provide crucial back-up to parents by blocking access to pornography when children intentionally or accidentally click on links advertised on social media. If adults want to gain access, all they have to do is verify they are over age 18. There exist cheap and convenient methods available that make this process anonymous.

Age-verification for online pornography is a common-sense and needed solution. Without age-verification, and with links to these sites being promoted all over social media, the result has been that America’s kids are frequently being exposed to highly inappropriate sexual material, even when their parents are doing everything to protect them.

One 2023 study, found that nearly 3 in 4 teens had been exposed to pornography. The average age of first exposure was 12 years old. More than half indicated that they had encountered pornography accidentally, and of those who encountered it accidentally, 63 percent had been exposed in the last week, suggesting that this is a common experience.

The majority of accidental exposure comes from online means: clicking a link, a search engine result, an online ad, or on some form of social media. Texas’s law would prevent such accidental exposure, because children clicking on a link wouldn’t be able to access the site unless they can verify they are over age 18.

The kind of pornography children are easily clicking to is also extremely grotesque. It is common for teens to report seeing pornography depicting rape, choking or pain. This is not art; it is a simulated sexual experience online. And the exposure of children to it is nothing short of online child sexual abuse. Children are the victims of Big Porn’s business.

This exposure is having negative effects on children’s lives in the real world. Nurses, doctors, teachers and principals are seeing children imitating and acting out on others the mature content they have consumed online. Emergency room nurses are increasingly seeing peer-to-peer child sexual abuse, often in instances where 11, 12 and 14-year-old boys are committing violent sexual assaults on 4- to 8-year-old girls. This shouldn’t surprise us; children have unique mirror neurons, meaning that they are especially prone to imitate what they see on the screen.

Owen Cleary, an educator in Ireland, shared in a BBC interview that access to hardcore pornography at an early age is affecting his student’s real-life relationships. He asked his 16-year-old students to make a list of what they thought was expected of them and of the other sex in sexual interactions. 

“For our male students,” he reported, “they expect to chase the woman, to slap and to choke her, to be dominant, to be aggressive, to be in control, to know what you want and be with as many as possible. For my female students, it's to be submissive, to be kicked and to be slapped and choked. To do what he says and to do what he likes.”

This is the education that pornography is giving children on relationships.

The reality is that without age-guarding these websites, it is far too easy for impressionable children to gain access. Parents are exasperated trying to effectively protect their children from accessing violent pornography, given the myriad of entry points through the hundreds of apps available and the smart devices that now travel with children 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Parents need back-up. States like Texas are working hard to give it to them.

We don’t take children to casinos and strip clubs and try to blindfold their eyes or have them wear earplugs. Instead, we simply don’t let them go to those places at all.

It should be the same for the virtual world. Kids should not be allowed inside of porn websites.

The court should recognize the ineffectiveness of filters and the vast changes in technology over the last 20 years that have negatively made pornography more accessible than ever to children and also positively made age-verification methods anonymous and quick so they now place very little burden on adults.

Ultimately, the court should uphold age-verification laws for porn sites as constitutional. The situation is urgent: The future of America’s children is on the line, and parents need help.

Clare Morell is the director of the Technology and Human Flourishing Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her forthcoming book, “The Tech Exit: A Manifesto for Freeing Our Kids,” will be published by Penguin Random House.