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?