Morality Campaigners

A coalition of anti-porn campaigners led by Barnardo's, has signed an open letter to the Culture Secretary Rt Hon Nadine Dorries urging her to introduce mandatory identity verification for access to online pornography.

The organisations are urging the Government to make it a legal requirement within the Online Safety Bill that commercial pornography websites protect children from their content using age verification methods.

There are already proposals in the draft Bill to ensure social media and user-to-user generated sites like TikTok keep children safe and protected from viewing harmful material - but the Bill needs to go further. Children do not access pornography through social media sites alone.

Viewing pornography -- often extreme and violent -- can distort children's understanding of healthy relationships and can normalise abusive sexual behaviour and have a corrosive effect on what children view as healthy relationships.

For the Online Safety Bill to be effective in protecting children, Barnardo's and other organisations believe it must include the following measures:

• Mandatory age verification measures for all sites containing pornographic material.

• Harmful and illegal content such as pornography with child abuse or violence against women and girls must not be allowed to be uploaded onto sites. Taking it down after days or weeks after countless viewings is just not acceptable.

• Extending Ofcom's powers to include regulation of commercial pornography sites which do not implement safety by design and age assurance.

• An end to the two-tier categorisation of sites which cannot be future-proofed as new sites can gain significant child viewers in a short time.

The signatories to the letter are:

• John Carr -- Chair of the Children's Charities' Coalition for Internet Safety
• NSPCC
• The Children's Society
• Childnet International
• Internet Matters
• Internet Watch Foundation
• 5Rights
• Catch22
• Kidscape
• End Violence Against Women Coalition
• Association of School and College Leaders
• Girlguiding
• The Lucy Faithfull Foundation
• The Marie Collins Foundation
• Dr Elena Martellozzo, Associate Professor in Criminology, Centre of Abuse and Trauma Studies, Middlesex University
• P SHE Association
• SafeLives
• ECPAT UK.

MP Maria Miller wants a parliamentary debate on whether digitally generated but imaginary nude images need to be banned.

It comes as another service which allows users to guess what people in photos look like undressed.

The DeepSukebe's nudifier website had more than five million visits in June, according to one analyst. Celebrities, including an Olympic athlete, are among those who users claim to have nudified.

DeepSukebe's website claims it can reveal the truth hidden under clothes. According to its Twitter page, it is an AI-leveraged nudifier whose mission is to make all men's dreams come true. And in a blog post, the developers say that they are working on a more powerful version of the tool.

Miller told the BBC it was time to consider a ban of such tools:

Parliament needs to have the opportunity to debate whether nude and sexually explicit images generated digitally without consent should be outlawed, and I believe if this were to happen the law would change.

If software providers develop this technology, they are complicit in a very serious crime and should be required to design their products to stop this happening.

She said that it should be an offence to distribute sexual images online without consent to reflect the severity of the impact on people's lives. Miller wants the issue to be included in the forthcoming Online Safety Bill.

CEASE (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation) is a new morality group campaigning against porn and sex work in the UK.

The group was founded in 2019 and describes itself on its website:

We shine a light on what sexual exploitation is, where it occurs and how it contravenes our human rights. We campaign for new and better laws, advocate for policy change and hold the global sex industry to account.

We're building a UK-wide movement of campaigners against sexual exploitation, and we're amplifying the voices of the very best advocates for change: survivors.

Its latest cunning plan is to hold the Information Commissioners Office (the UK data protection censor) as responsible for failing to prevent the world's porn sites from obtaining usage data from under 18s. The group writes on its website:

We are threatening to take legal action against the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for failing to protect children's data from misuse by porn sites.

The excuses the ICO has given for its failure to fulfil its regulatory duties are legally and factually flawed. What's more, it has left children exposed to a profit-hungry industry which is intent on drawing children back again and again to watch violent and abusive pornographic material for its own financial gain.

The group quotes long time porn campaigner John Carr:

I was shocked and dismayed by the Information Commissioner's reply to me in which they refused to act against porn sites which were collecting and processing children's data on a large scale. If the data protection laws weren't designed to protect children ... I am sure a lot of parents will wonder just what they were designed to do.

Anti porn campaigners have been cataloguing porn titles on Pornhub, XVideos and xHamster and claim that one in eight have titles describing sexually violent acts. Their use of the term 'sexually violent' is a little bizarre though, and inevitably has been redefined to include non-violent material that the authors deem to be violent totally at odds with normal people's use of the English language.

The campaigners analysed 131,738 titles of videos that appeared on the front page of the tube websites (without specifically searching for anything nor allowing the site to build up a profile of preferences).

The campaigners claimed that

• 8,421 (6.4%) titles included terms for family relationships and 5,785 (4.4%) titles described sexual activity between family members - the most common category of 'sexually violent' material identified in the survey
• 5,389 (4.1%) titles referred to physical aggression or the depiction of forced sexual activity (acknowledging that performers had likely consented
• 2,966 (2.2%) titles described image-based sexual abuse, including hidden cams and upskirting
• 2,698 (1.7%) titles described as coercion and exploitation

The campaigners excluded BDSM material as they seemed to have gotten confused about whether the term 'violence' applies to the genre that seems to be higher more PC than other genres.

Pornhub's owner Mindgeek recently removed millions of videos that had been uploaded by users who had not been verified after claims of hosting illegal content. But it commented on the clips it has allowed to remain online:

Consenting adults are entitled to their own sexual preferences, as long as they are legal and consensual, and all kinks that meet these criteria are welcome on Pornhub.

Academic Clare McGlynn who co-authored the survey, said:

It's shocking that this is the material that the porn companies themselves are choosing to showcase to first-time users.

Collegue Fiona Vera-Gray and co-author of the survey, said:

Sexually violent material eroticised non-consent and distorted the boundary between sexual pleasure and sexual violence.

The survey, titled Sexual violence as a sexual script in mainstream online pornography, is published in the latest issue of The British Journal of Criminology. with its abstract reading:

This article examines the ways in which mainstream pornography positions sexual violence as a normative sexual script by analysing the video titles found on the landing pages of the three most popular pornography websites in the United Kingdom. The study draws on the largest research sample of online pornographic content to date and is unique in its focus on the content immediately advertised to a new user. We found that one in eight titles shown to first-time users on the first page of mainstream porn sites describe sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence. Our findings raise serious questions about the extent of criminal material easily and freely available on mainstream pornography websites and the efficacy of current regulatory mechanisms.

Offsite Comment: Academic Click Bate: The War On Porn Continues

7th April 2021. See article from reprobatepress.com by David Flint

The study makes big claims that were inevitably picked up and repeated uncritically by media outlets like the BBC. But even a cursory glance at the evidence and the conclusions might make a more open-minded person raise their eyebrows. If ever there was a study that set out in search of evidence to back up a belief already held, this is it.

See article from reprobatepress.com

Offsite Comment: British Journal of Criminology Study on Violence in Porn

10th April 2021. See article from avn.com

If you only read headlines about a new study from the British Journal of Criminology you might think that large quantities of criminal videos of sexual violence on tube sites are warping most children's minds, turning them into sexual violators.

But this isn't even close to true. The coverage of the study is misleading and exaggerated. But the study itself is extremely flawed.

First, the researchers included everything from stepmom to ploughed in the category of sexual violence. Defined that broadly, it's shocking the study found only one in eight videos depicted sexual violence.

See full article from avn.com

CitizenGO is a religious morality campaign group. They have taken issue for a rather aggressively woke Cadbury's Creme advert that features two gay men being very sexual about sharing a chocolate egg.

CitizenGO has organised a petition against the advert currently signed by about 30,000 people. The group writes:

Petition to Guy Parker, Chief Executive of the Advertising Standards Agency and Louise Stigant, Managing Director of Cadbury's UK:

I wish to register a complaint about the Cadbury's Creme Egg advertising campaign currently being distributed across mainstream media which features a gay couple engaged in a sexually intimate act.

Cadburys are a well-established household name who deliberately market their products towards families and children; therefore, it is unacceptable that they should seek to expose children to an image which is so clearly hyper-sexualised.

Given that children often copy what they see on screen, the advert constitutes a form of grooming, exposing children to inappropriate and graphic sexual content.

By featuring a gay couple, Cadbury's are aiming to escape criticism by using the cover of inclusiveness and diversity. Still, this sexually graphic advertisement has no place being shown on mainstream media where children can view it.

Such sexual objectification is against the ASA's code of conduct.

I urge you to take immediate action and immediately withdraw the advert from mainstream circulation