Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)

Imagine you have a 12-year-old child and found out that child was watching or was exposed to pornography on a sitting room television while visiting a friend's house. The child would likely be permanently banned from visiting that friend's house and it is likely you would report the parent to Tusla. Yet, we are giving our children smartphones with open access to the Internet where they regularly encounter misogynistic and toxic content online, especially on well-known pornographic websites. Ignorance is not bliss any more. Parents, Coimisiún na Meán and the Government need to step up and urgently act to protect our children. Children as young as those still in primary school are accessing porn. A recent UK study found that one in ten children has viewed pornography by the age of nine with half the respondents seeing it by the age of 13.

I am not trying to be the fun police or drag Ireland back to the time when sex was seen as bad or dirty, but gone are the days when teenagers hid magazines underneath their pillows. Nowadays, access to pornography is a free-for-all and completely unregulated. Just a cursory glance at some of the adult websites accessible in Ireland shows that these expect users to check a box to claim they are aged 18, with little to no age verification. The content our children are viewing has been shown to increase mental health challenges and sexual aggression and decrease stability for future relationships. Children and teenagers are getting the wrong impression of sex. It is grooming our boys to be violent and our girls to be submissive and think they should consent to sexual violence. Their young minds think that this what sex is, this is how they should behave, this is what they should expect or even this is what they should look like.

We need robust policies and legislation to stop the pornography industry from profiting off our children. We need to start the age verification process and we must have strict enforcement by the online safety commissioner for non-compliant websites, which should face fines. France recently introduced an enforcement mechanism that results in websites in breach of age verification systems facing significant fines and even being permanently banned. Our online safety commissioner, Niamh Hodnett, said that video sharing platforms established in Ireland will have to have age verification measures to block under-18s from accessing adult content by 21 July. My question is: "Or what?" What consequences will they face? What about the companies that are not established here?

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