World pornography authority Professor Gail Dines says, “Iceland is taking a very progressive approach that no other democratic country has tried.”
Two years after the Icelandic Parliament successfully banned strip clubs, based on “the grounds that they violated the civil rights of the women who worked there and were harmful to society,” The island nation may become the first Western democratic nation to outlaw internet porn. Several new proposals in parliament are based on the argument that “porn violates the rights of both women who appear in it and children who are exposed to it.” The Daily Mail reports that legislation which bans the “printing and distribution” of pornographic materials has been in place in Iceland for quite some time, but it has never been updated to include the internet.
Several committees have been set up by Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson to determine the most effective way to block the “flood of graphic sexual material” that comes to the island via computers, games consoles and smartphones. Some of the methods being considered include a nationwide block on known porn IP addresses, and passing a law that would make it illegal to use credit cards based out of Iceland to access the sites.
Concerns over the potentially harmful effect of internet porn on children were first brought to the governments attention in 2010 after a nationwide inquiry and “wide-ranging consultation process” was undertaken to focus on how rape and sexual assault cases are handled in the Icelandic justice system. The investigation found that,
Children exposed to violent pornography at an early age were showing the similar signs of trauma as youngsters who had been actually abused … These included becoming increasingly isolated and playing out what they had seen on the internet on younger family members or other children … It concluded that the extremely violent nature of the material now freely available on the web was increasing the intensity of sex attacks.
Mr. Jónasson, who is a member of the Left Green Movement, claims that “filtering out porn is not a question of censorship. We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime.”
The political advisor to the Interior Minister, Halla Gunnarsdóttir says, “There is a strong consensus building in Iceland … We have so many experts from educationalists to the police and those who work with children behind this, that this has become much broader than party politics … This move is not anti-sex. It is anti-violence because young children are seeing porn and acting it out. That is where we draw the line … This material is blurring the boundaries for young people about what is right and wrong.”
While many argue that it is the right and responsibility of parents to determine what, and when their children are exposed to “graphic sexual content,” Miss Gunnarsdóttir argues that parents can no longer be held fully responsible for what types of sexually explicit material their children come into contact with. She says, “Parents are not the only ones responsible for protecting our young people. They cannot be with their children all the time and the porn industry actively tries to seek children out … Children also no longer use computers just in their homes. They access the internet in many places, in many ways and on smartphones. We say protecting our children is a task for the whole society.”
Do you think it is the right, or responsibility of the government to ban porn to protect children?
About Kathryn DeHoyos
Children can watch people killed on tv, torn apart in saw, yet we worry about porn? Internet filters, not giving them their own smartphone unless it’s got filters on it would be a start. The internet is not a place to just dump your kid n leave them. The internet should always be able to have adult content, I will not support measures to block ALL adult content whether that be violent games or porn because I as an adult have the right to choose to view it. Make a safe-net for kids to be in and let the adults have their unrestricted content. There’s nothing progressive about blocking all porn.
“This comment could only come from a man…. nice work minimising degradation, exploitation and sexual violence. Selfish, exploitative, narcissistic hedonist.”
Yes only a man could be so worried about censoring the internet for ALL to cater to children. The fear of children being exposed to content is justification to outright ban it because that is the intelligent thing to do.
Thank-you mods for allowing personal attacks through, along with misandry to boot. Nice work to the commenter for showing outright sexism towards men on a site for men whilst assuming I am minimizing the harms done in porn. Did it ever occur to you that it’s a bad idea to through the good out with the bad? Not all porn is degrading, violent, etc, infact I’d say most porn has no actual violence. Yet with this law even the most feminist, loving porn will be banned, porn free of exploitation, violence, degradation.
Why should adults be restricted in what they view to protect children? Do we ban all violence in movies? Hell the bible has outright hatespeech n violence in it, depicts sexual activity so why isn’t that banned to protect the children? Let’s ban alcohol too, ban cars because kids can drive them and harm themselves, ban motorbikes because a lot of kids get injured n die from them, ban soda n bad foods because of the obesity epidemic, let’s make all schools single sex, identify the homosexuals n separately teach them so as to avoid all cases of kids having sex because it can be harmful. Let’s ban peanuts because some kids are harmed, what else can we ban? Let’s bubble wrap society to protect the children!!!111 Because we’re too fucking lazy to adequately teach kids how to handle seeing something like porn, too fucking lazy to restrict their usage of the internet. Hell why not just ban kids on the internet because there are pedophiles, porn, violence accessible on the internet? Why not ban it because some kids get addicted to it and has harmful effects?
This law is one of the most ignorant I’ve ever seen and the worst way to handle it. It amounts to an act to try turn the entire society into a padded playground because of the chance a kid will come across content that is suited to adults meanwhile kids are around other adult-stuff like cars etc yet seemingly can be restricted in their usage to protect them.
Want to do something to stop the pornification? Monitor their usage, install appropriate white-lists, hell make a government white-list and make it illegal for kids to access the normal internet if it’s that bad. The only way to stop kids seeing porn is to remove their access to unrestricted internet usage, that means you have to disable file-sharing (since porn can be made and sent easily by anyone really), you have to remove camera phones (many kids make their own porn if you didn’t know), you have to MONITOR their usage always.
The internet is worldwide, nearly impossible to restrict all content, even people in CHINA with a very tough internet filter see porn. The ONLY way to prevent kids seeing porn is to shut down the internet and disable all cameras, burn all porn imagery. As long as a person with a camera phone is alive and can transmit it, porn WILL always exist. Childporn is already illegal yet very difficult to police worldwide, it still gets made. We can ban violent porn but it’ll still get made, still be on peoples hdd’s who will share it. This pandora’s box has already been opened!
How did this comment get by the mods of this site. A complete personal attack on Archy. I don’t usually call for bans, but this comment by chris should warrant a ban.
BTW, chris, banning porn is all well and good but what’s next. After all , violence is very harmfull to kids and yet we see it everyday, way more than porn.
(MOD NOTE: Comment has been blocked for personal attack)
Thanks, looks like it has been dealt with. I don’t mind criticism of what I say but outright sexism n useless personal attacks are annoying.
Porn, violent or not, was unhealthy for me to grow up with, and caused problems for me that I had no idea were related until I finally decided to give it up for good 3 months ago. (I am a 25 year old male). There is no way for parents to successfully prevent their children from seeing online porn all by themselves, it is too easy to get to one way or another, especially as most children are more computer savvy than their parents anyway. Porn is something that one should be able to decide on as an adult, but not as a child.
Here is a great TED talk on what online porn does to a child’s brain (it is much different from other forms of porn): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU
And here is a 47,000-member online support group for people who have given up porn (and who see benefits, for various reasons, from not masturbating as well): http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/
Thanks for writing this article
Archy, you often say exactly what I’m thinking when I read this tripe. I agree with you 100%.
I would also like to point out that parents who let the government raise their kids due to being “busy” (IMO “lazy” or “scared”) are utter sheep, leaving their lambs at risk from the real wolves. Stand up and raise your kids, folks. Give the informed, educated and age-appropriate sex talk, preferably earlier than you think you should. Teach abuse prevention, respect, consent (even for hugs from relatives they don’t want to hug). Don’t teach shame, guilt, and especially body shame. Don’t teach via culture and conversation that sex or nudity is shameful or they’ll be messed up and ashamed of it as adults. Instead teach values about respect for their bodies, and focus on safety. I have four kids, so I’m not an armchair parent.
Also, as a survivor of child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking, my knee-jerk response is to feel offended at the hogwash of the idea that children who see Internet porn are affected as if they were actually sexually abused. To me, this shows a gross ignorance of what child sexual abuse does to victims/survivors. Trust me, if your kid stumbles over your porn bookmarks, they won’t be damaged just as if they’d actually been raped by an adult. Vast difference.
Along that same line, I call hogwash on the idea that stumbling across a porn site is going to suddenly make a child compulsively act out what they saw on other kids. Most kids think kissing is gross or funny. Seeing it doesn’t make them start kissing their siblings.
No, kids shouldn’t be looking at porn, and yes it can be bad for them in the sense of confusing and shocking them.
I’m not a child psychologist, but I am in therapy to deal with my childhood. My abusers made me star in child porn, yes as a child, as young as five. Child pornography, as it does real and forever harm to children, should be banned and anybody in possession of or making it needs to rot in prison, alongside the sick criminals who rape children. But adult porn, starring adults, and for adults, I see no problem with. Porn is like a bookstore. If you like easy reading, head for that section and avoid the hardcore stuff. To each their own in legal age and consenting porn.
Adults have the right to make porn if they choose, and adults have the right to view the type that they choose. Among adults, if you object to your partner viewing porn, you both will have to discuss that and work it out. Your inability to reach the results you want does not constitute a right to ban legal adult porn for the rest of us adults.
Obviously, don’t let your kids find the porn. Use Nanny software, on home PCs and the kids’ smartphones. Parents have to realize though that kids can be more tech savvy than them, so teach them some values to shoreup any gaps and above all, tell your kids you love them. If kids feel loved and respected and they know they can come to you with any problem, they are happier and safer kids. It generally makes them more inclined to want to follow your rules, too – at least until the teen years kick in.
Lastly, please keep in mind that comparing the damage done to a raped child to the affect on a child seeing a porno is just as gross and offensive a comparison as saying you having to stand on an overcrowded bus is just as bad as the struggle of Rosa Parks.
This is a fantastically progressive move. Bravo to you, Iceland, for facing this and dealing with it. I’m waiting for the USA to catch up with you.
If China & Saudi Arabia can’t stomp out porn with their draconian measures what makes you think Iceland will? BTW keep voting for the right to control your neighbor’s actions, nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
I’m not taking a side either way on the issue, but I found the legal wording behind their move rather interesting. They say the reasoning behind the possible ban is that “porn violates the rights of both women who appear in it and children who are exposed to it.” But I do have to ask: what about men in porn, who appear in “films” where they are abused or degraded (they do exist)? What about gay pornography? I guess, since they’re not women, men (gay or straight) can’t have their rights violated.
No, the anti-pornography radical feminists usually condemn all brands of pornography across the board. And they say that male persons are also degraded and violated by pornography and that is bad too. Of course, that is probably a secondary concern.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/12/gender.politicsphilosophyandsociety
When she says “the children who are violated to make it,” it seems that she is conflating gay pornography with child pornography.
tendrecroppes beat me to it. Oh, well, here’s my ditto:
According to the official announcement,
“porn violates the rights of both women who appear in it…”
– So, male-on-male porn would be acceptable?
“…and children who are exposed to it.”
– Perhaps it’s a translation issue, but I can’t help but notice the use of passive voice, which avoids any question of human responsibility. Children are exposed to it, by whom? Porn just has a mind of its own and infiltrates a society like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers? A more precise law, more focused on human culpability, would target the people who expose children to porn, instead of walling off parts of the internet.
Huh, I always thought America was the only country where people would rather babyproof the entire nation than actually parent their own kids.
I don’t see this actually working though. People who want to look at porn will still find a way unless they prevent anyone in Iceland from accessing servers outside of Iceland.
Exactly. I’m puzzled why this being labeled as ‘progressive.’ What could more regressive than invoking puritanical anti-sex attitudes to clamp down on freedom “for the children”?
I have often wondered , is porn as exploitive as other industries.
I wish I had the money to conduct an experiment in a large US or Canadian city.
Here is what I would do
I would advertise in the local newspaper, kijji or other forms of media looking for porn actresses and see how many responses I would get.
If the industry is as explotive as some claim I should get next to none , if I were honest and upfront about what I wanted. After all, if people aren’t making a personal choice to do porn and are somehow tricked into it then no one would answer the ad.
I was reading some time ago that porn studios have so many young women on their lists that they can’t keep up.
Have a look at the fashion industry for example and the ‘cat walks’, now there is an explotive industry but they are mainstream and although SOME are against them, there isn’t a huge upcry about them from what I have seen
But radical feminists and most other radical types do not accept this notion of consent and “making a personal choice.” For them, there is no such thing as consensual “sex work” (or any kind of work probably). For them, female persons only choose to do work like pornography because of “false consciousness” or because they are psychologically “colonized” by the patriarchy and such.
Supposedly, female persons only make such choices because of structural inequality and oppression that subjugates and indoctrinates them. And until we follow the radical feminist directive to destroy all gender inequality and remake society to obey their egalitarian precepts, these “personal choices” of women to do things like pornography or sex work are vitiated and invalid. Presumably, once women have been freed of their “false consciousness,” they will all flock to Ivy League universities to get degrees in Women’s Studies.
In the course of a few years, Iceland has gone from outlawing in-person striptease to wanting to outlaw all internet pornography. Moving on to things like Victoria’s Secret or Maxim or Harper’s Bazaar is not implausible. Just give Iceland some time.
The hypocrisy is that those who are calling porn so exploitative are probably wearing clothes made by children in slave-labour style conditions, etc. I do hope they are also working against that too.
This is an incredibly dumb idea for one very simple reason: It won’t work. It’s impossible to block all porn, and in practice you can’t even block most porn without also blocking a huge number of legitimate sites, ranging from sex ed, to sites about Cockfosters and Scunthorpe, to sites like the GMP, which happen to mention a lot of “verboten” terms.
That’s before we even begin to deal with deciding what counts as porn, given that the best definition anyone can come up with so far is “I know it when I see it”.
You beat me to it. My thoughts exactly. Good point about how the GMP would probably be banned.
Another irony, perhaps, is that the Scandinavian countries, particularly Iceland, have a really low birth rate. Children are actually less common than they use to be. Maybe that’s part of the context? Protecting a vanishing group of people?
Two quotes from two of my countrymen come to mind, “the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship” and “as to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible
to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends,” George Bernard Shaw and Jeremy Bentham respectively. Censorship of expression is just a bad idea on so many levels.
The existence of porn may offend, but it does not entail a violation of women or children’s rights. The argument that it does is riddled with gaping holes. It doesn’t make any logical sense, but I guess if you repeat it enough, some people will start to believe it. In Western democracies, adult women have, at least, the same rights as adult men. No one can legally force them to do anything that cannot be legally forced upon a man. The fact that an individual may find a form of expression offensive is not important. To quote another of my countrymen, “what is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” – Salman Rusdie.
As for the children, I feel sorry for the adults in Iceland if their government now intend to ban everything consensual that they enjoy that could possibly harm a child. Naturally, reasonable measures should be taken to protect children from elements in the world that could potentially be harmful, but this should not mean completely restructuring society around concerns for children and banning everything. Strategies can be used to protect children, but you are never going to get perfection, even with a ban. And I don’t for one second believe that children who see porn, experience trauma equivalent to that experienced by a child who has actually been abused. Children are far more savvy and resilient than that. They are clearly being used as an attachment to scaremonger and garner further support for those who advocate against porn.
It’s too late for Iceland’s government anyway; the genie is already out of the bottle. As we have seen with lumbering governments intent on controlling the public in the past, people become more fascinated by that which they have an appetite for and which has been banned. It will be a tall order for Iceland’s government to prevent people, children included, from circumventing whatever obstacles they impose, in order to access the porn produced in the rest of the world. Say no to censorship.
Gail Dines is not a “world pornography authority”, she’s an anti-pornography activist. Don’t believe me? That’s the description that SHE HERSELF uses on her website. She calls herself “Anti-Pornography Activist, Lecturer, Author, Professor”. So not only is she far from objective, but she considers her anti-pornography activism as more important to her description than the fact that she is a lecturer, an author and a professor.
As far as I am concerned, she has no credibility.
This new law is unfortunately only too expected from Nordic countries, where feminism of an especially hostile mindset reigns, one that infantilizes women like none other (official law written by feminists call sex workers “victims of male violence against women”, even when the sex workers themselves strongly reject the label). I would say that the dominant feminism in Sweden is not about protecting or helping women, but about seeking to control men and their sexuality as much as possible. The worst example of “gender as team sport”-feminism, where they will favor any policy that gives more power to women and less to men, screw equality.
I would not label this as a “progressive” move. Quite the opposite, at least the way that I think of “progressive.” Maybe in the really old-fashioned sense of the Progressives from the 1890’s in America. Those old-school Progressives banned reproductive information from being sent through the mail, in the name of protecting people from obscenity. Even medical students couldn’t have their textbooks sent through the mail because the books showed where babies came from.
This is a repressive move. One could present an argument that it could help protect children, but that by itself does not make it progressive. States and other powerful institutions restrict all sorts of things in the name of protecting children. Does Iceland have the technology and resources to monitor and block the internet? Last I checked they were in a serious budget crisis. This would call for a massive new government agency. Perhaps they can learn from China how to make it work….
I’d be curious to see what committee is going to rule on what counts as porn and what doesn’t. That will make some hysterically funny moments. The really cynical part of me suspects this could be a form of economic protectionism – keep the competition away from the island’s own porn industry. This ban could really stimulate the publishers of local lad mags. It will certainly incentivize the importation of DVD’s…..
If this was an American legislature, I’d assume that it was politicians trying to get public attention away from real issues by distracting them with a hot-button issue. Do other countries have politics like that?
Then again, however repressive this law sounds, based on my reading of Icelandic crime novels, the country has a very tolerant prison system. Even the worst offenders have incredibly brief sentences. I can’t imagine anything more than a slap on the wrist.
Okay, this posting says “Iceland Set to Block Internet Porn” as if the law were imminent and a done deal. Other reports are saying that this might not be the case:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/tech/web/porn-ban-iceland/index.html?hpt=hp_bn5
Well, we’ll see what happens.