In an effort to protect minors from accessing pornography, legislators in Louisiana recently enacted a new law to require age verification for accessing adult websites. House Bill 142 – now called Act 440 – passed with bipartisan support.
Child safety advocates are applauding the state’s action.
“The Louisiana law recommends digital identity technology that the state has already established, among other age verification methods, so the requirement is not at all burdensome,” said Dr. Eleanor Gaetan, vice president and director of public policy for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).
“The verification process is easy, accessible, and very private. The fact is, most websites already have and use technology that identifies a user’s age and uses that data for marketing purposes, so this does not burden businesses either,” she explained.
According to a report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit child advocacy group, three-quarters of teenagers have viewed pornography online by the age of 17, with the average age of first exposure at age 12.
Lisa Thompson, NCOSE Vice President of Research, said porn’s well-documented harms to kids are devastating.
“Everything from depressive symptoms, low self-esteem, reduced grades in school, more adoption of sexist attitudes, greater involvement in risky sexual behaviors and even engaging in exploitative activities with other children,” Thompson told CBN News.
“So, it’s really staggering when you consider the wide-ranging harms that children suffer when they’re exposed to pornography. And those harms are escalated, the younger they are the more extreme those harms become that we as a society have not stepped up to protect them online,” she said.
NCOSE is now pushing all online porn sites to follow Louisiana’s new law.
“Louisiana’s new law to require age verification in order to access online pornography is a commonsense measure that will better protect children from the harms of pornography. We urge all online pornography sites to comply with the new law,” Gaetan said.
Thompson hopes more states will follow Louisiana’s lead and implement age verification to better protect children from the harms of pornography.
“We feel like Louisiana’s law passing that we have some really strong momentum,” said Thompson. “And we know too that across the country we keep hearing from families and young people who’ve grown up and become adults who’ve had this harmful experience of being exposed to pornography when they were young, and there’s a movement growing of people who want to see this stopped. We need to do a much better job of protecting our children from this kind of content. They deserve better from us,” Thompson added.
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