NZ Children's Minister Wants Online Pornography to be Regulated But Study Will Miss the Point

By: Isaac Davison
Social Issues Reporter, NZ Herald

New Zealand could follow the United Kingdom in bringing in age restrictions for online pornography and blocking websites which refuse to comply.

Department of Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin, who also holds the children's portfolio, says young people are being "bombarded" by internet pornography and she wants censorship laws to be strengthened.

"This is a really, really big issue to New Zealand and we are going to have a serious conversation about it," she told the Herald.

"And I hope to make sure we have this conversation in this term of Government."

Martin supports the approach of the United Kingdom, which has ambitious - and controversial - plans to introduce mandatory age verification for pornographic websites later this year.

She made the comments after the Chief Censor began a major piece of research on New Zealand teenagers' online pornography habits. Expected to be completed in December, the research will be used to inform Government policy, including possible regulation.

"We're pretty excited about it," Chief Censor David Shanks said. "We think it's going to give us some potentially world-leading data on the New Zealand situation and teens and pornography.

"With this research our aim is to get solid evidence about the experiences and perspectives of young people on the table so there can be an informed debate."

Don't forget the pre-teens. Adolescence is the most vulnerable time for boys to be viewing pornography. Adolescence is when the brain re-wires and pornography results in many of the wires getting crossed. I believe it is responsible for the culture of rape in high schools and colleges.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification began the survey last week of 2300 people aged between 14 and 17.

"In our view policy in this area does need some consideration, in terms of how do you regulate use and access to porn in the digital environment," Shanks said.

"The question there is . . . when the average age to get a smartphone is 10 and a half to 11 years old, what sort of tools and restrictions can we really place on access to material that's widely available on the internet?"

Martin said the Chief Censor's research was "vital work", though she is already intent on changes.

"I have already had conversations with the Chief Censor with regard to a particular drive of mine to make sure we as a nation do something about what is the bombardment of pornography and the easy access to pornography that our young people are experiencing.

"Considering our censorship laws were pre-internet, this is an area that we have left for a long time without addressing and I think we need to address it."

New Zealand censorship laws already ban some types of pornography, such as material which includes violence, rape or degrading acts. But the Office of Film and Literature Classification's work is mostly limited to DVDs released in New Zealand, and online pornography is effectively unregulated. The Department of Internal Affairs' work in this area is primarily focused on online content featuring child sexual abuse.

The UK Government has a policy which allows internet service providers to block porn websites unless people older than 18 "opt in" to use them. It plans to go further this year by bringing in age verification requirements for online pornography, which will include powers to block websites which don't offer "age gates".

Martin said she was not interested in wholesale bans on online content because they did not work. But she supported the UK Government's approach, saying she was interested in any policy which helped to protect young people.

"I would really like to watch how they implement it and see what are the challenges for them," she said.

Justice Minister Andrew Little, who would have joint responsibility for any regulation changes, said he was aware of concerns that had been raised about the effects of pornography on children. He was open to ideas about regulatory approaches which New Zealand could take to address these problems, he said.

Shanks said new regulations may not be required at all, or they could be part of a range of solutions including education for young people.

He said any causational link between viewing pornography and sexual assault was "very difficult to prove", but there was enough evidence to urge caution about the impact of widely accessible pornography.

His office was keeping a close eye on the UK model, which has stirred debate about internet freedoms and whether the internet can be effectively regulated.

"It's certainly not an easy thing to implement socially or technologically," Shanks said. "It's just worth paying attention to, to see if gets traction or not."

The survey of internet pornography use will ask if teenagers look at online pornography, how often, what sort of content, why they are looking at it, and how they are viewing it. It requires parental consent, but the participants will fill out the survey anonymously and privately.

You are basically looking at the picture with one eye closed and the other half open if you leave out adolescents. Why the restriction to 14-17 year olds? You will completely miss the point!

PORNOGRAPHY AND THE LAW

• Censorship laws ban "objectionable" publications, which include exploitation of children, violent sex or rape, necrophilia, use of urine or excrement for degrading sexual conduct, bestiality, or torture.

• The Chief Censor reviews all DVDs released or imported into NZ, but online content is effectively unregulated.

• The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) monitors online use and primarily focuses on material related to child sexual abuse.

• A filtering system run by DIA blocks websites which contain child sexual abuse content.

Can India Ban Pornography Completely?

Soutik Biswas
Delhi correspondent
BBC India

Kamlesh Vaswani says pornography is a "moral cancer" which hurts India's future

On his many trips to Internet cafes in the bustling central Indian city of Indore, lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani discovered what he calls the "epidemic" of pornography.

"I would go to download important Supreme Court judgements, and pornographic adverts would pop up instead. And when I looked around, I saw rows of children surfing porn openly without a care in the world," says Mr Vaswani, 43, a quiet man with a probing look.

He says he went to the local court and discussed it with his colleagues. "They were also saying that porn was everywhere around us. Something had to be done about it."

What shook him up further, he says, was the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old Indian student in Delhi in December 2012. The attack caused international outrage and prompted India to introduce stringent anti-rape laws.

Mr Vaswani had been in Delhi on some work on the day of the incident, and he says he felt "guilty" that he couldn't do anything to avert the crime. He believed that the attackers must have been watching porn.

Controversial plea

"Why are the youth failing India? Because they are drowning in porn," he says.

He also believes that India's GDP could be increased if people were discouraged from watching porn.

"People watch porn, and become selfish. They don't want to give back to the nation," he says.

Three winters ago, Mr Vaswani began writing a public interest petition to the Supreme Court, making a controversial case for a ban on Internet porn. Confined to home to look after his ailing father, he wrote up the 200-page, 20,000-word plea on his laptop in a month's time.

The top court - to his surprise, he says - admitted the petition and heard it on April 2013.

Since then, Mr Vaswani's petition has acquired a life of its own: earlier in August, it was responsible for the government's rather ham-handed decision to block free access to 857 porn sites, which was swiftly lifted following outrage over the move. Mr Vaswani has attended nearly 20 hearings related to the case in a little more than two years.

Mr Vaswani's wife Rinki is a school teacher and son Jyotirmaya is a student

The petition seeks a ban on all sites showing porn, and calls for "new, exhaustive anti-pornography laws"

Mr Vaswani's petition says that pornography is "worse than Hitler, worse than Aids, cancer or any epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped".

Many would call the petition's words extreme - or paranoid. And many in India have argued against a ban on pornography - arguing that this would restrict civil liberties.

However, Mr Vaswani is adamant that pornography makes people selfish and unproductive.

His petition also argues that watching porn "puts the country's security in danger, encourages violent acts, unacceptable behaviour in society, exploitation of children and lowers the dignity of women".

Mr Vaswani's efforts led the government to temporarily ban hundreds of sites

Mr Vaswani, the son of a government worker and a homemaker mother, grew up in a middle-class joint family. He went to two schools, including a convent.

He says he failed to clear the highly competitive medical examinations five times, dashing his hopes of becoming a doctor. He then moved between various career choices: he picked up a degree in science, wanted to pick up one in arts, and then settled for a career in law. He has been a practising lawyer for more than a decade now.

I met Mr Vaswani at his home in Indore, an unkempt city, bristling with shops and lawyers.

He lives with his teacher wife and his school-going son in an austere two-bedroom apartment in a grotty, 35-year-old multi-storeyed building. The pale pink walls of the sitting room were adorned with a religious painting and another of his guru, while a book on criminal law and the Hindu holy book Bhagvad Gita lay on a small bed flanked by a TV set.

Fellow travellers

Mr Vaswani describes himself as "an ordinary lawyer".

"I am grateful to the top court for admitting my petition. My next public interest litigation will demand cheap and affordable treatment for cancer," he says. It is a tribute to his father who died of cancer last year.

Mr Vaswani has been joined by some fellow travellers in his journey to banish porn.

One of them is Atul Gupta, a 40-year-old electronics engineer and an alumnus of the prestigious Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science, who lives near Delhi. Mr Gupta has been going to schools and people's homes for years installing filters and blocking porn sites. Last year, after reading about Mr Vaswani's petition in the papers, he got in touch with him and offered him help, telling him that the technology was available to block sites.

"I think porn is like drugs. It needs to be banned," says Mr Gupta.

Then there is Suresh Shukla, a 37-year-old chemical engineer from top engineering school Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), who now runs a company based in the holy town of Varanasi selling anti-pornography solutions and filters.

He provided the list of 857 "high traffic, verified sites" to the government, which led to the sites being blocked briefly. The number of sites classed as porn by his company has now swelled to more than 200,000, he says.

At his company, he says, women researchers and employees "enjoy the veto power" over men, in categorising certain "non-explicit" sites like joke and cartoon sites, as porn. "This is not about Mr Vaswani, this is about a larger battle," he says.

Suresh Shukla runs a company selling pornography blocking solutions

Last week, the government told the Supreme Court at a hearing of Mr Vaswani's petition that although child pornography must be banned, "we cannot be present in everyone's bedroom".

Was this a setback to his campaign, I asked.

"Not at all. The government is trying to divert the issue and make it one about invasion of privacy. This is not about privacy, this is about saving India," he said, sounding confident.

"I am confident that the court will overrule objections and ban porn."

I asked him whether he was being too optimistic.

"It will happen sooner than you think," he said. "Maybe in four-five months."

How likely is that? If there was outrage at banning 857 sites, what kind of reaction would there be to banning 200,000?

I applaud the goal though. I also believe pornography is detrimental to society and women in particular. I believe there is a direct correlation between pornography available to adolescent boys and the culture of rape that exists in so many North American universities. I believe it is horribly degrading to women, society in general, and the men who would become the next generation of leaders.

I hope and pray that India will lead the way in what has to happen if modern society is going to survive.