Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. Gabhaim buíochas léi as ucht teacht anseo don díospóireacht. We are all aware of the increase in sexual crime, including sexual violence, in our society. Some, but only some, of the increase is due to a greater readiness to report such crime. Due to high-profile cases, there is heightened awareness that we need to do something, yet people are afraid. Women are afraid. There is the international dimension to this, of course. The trafficking of women and children to our shores to have violence and exploitation visited on them is one thing. There is also the fact we have no idea of how much crime, especially violence against women, is due to irregular newcomers to our shores because we seem not to want to record those statistics or do careful analysis. To do that analysis would not be in any way racist. It would be the height of prudence if we really wished to dispel fears, address all crime at its source, and take the kind of steps that would properly integrate integration itself into our law and policy.

These lapses should not, however, lead us to presume that crime is an imported phenomenon. We have a deeply serious problem of homegrown sexual assault and violence which needs our attention. Citizens have a right to expect our Government to keep our streets and public spaces safe. Two weeks ago in the Dáil, the Minister, Deputy McEntee, said "The murder of Ashling Murphy continues to weigh heavily on all of our hearts" and warned "we have moved into a phase in which young people have access to violence and violent pornography at the touch of a button on their phones". To this day, we have never had a real conversation about the contribution of violent pornography, as revealed at the trial, to the tragic death and outrageous killing of Ana Kriégel. It was as if it was an embarrassment for us to discuss it. The circumstances of this innocent girl's death appalled us, yet we did nothing about a clear contributory factor, which was the access of a youth attacker to violent pornography.

Pornography is a multibillion dollar industry with a huge international dimension. Under its Digital Services Act of 2023, the EU identified very large online platforms as those with more than 45 million users within the EU. At least three of those 20 were porn sites. Pornography is a big business, said to be worth $13 billion in the United States and $100 billion worldwide. That big business has much to lose through any kind of regulation. It is a business which thrives on addictive tendencies within the human person. It is a business which realises that, just as with the gambling and tobacco industries, it can be ever more successful by engaging people when they are young. Whatever impact it has on the human brain, that impact appears to be long-lasting and life-changing where young people are involved.

Typically, it is men who are users, although the porn industry has no intention of allowing its market to be constrained by sex or gender. Studies show that men who use pornography have poorer well-being than non-users. They report being less satisfied with their lives, having more depressive symptoms and poorer self-image. Men and women who use pornography have higher levels of aggression and are more likely to cope with stress by using negative strategies such as drinking alcohol or drug-taking or simply opting out. The many destructive messages of pornography eke their way into society to the detriment of all.

People who view pornography find themselves seeking out more and more extreme kinds. When children view pornography that shows abusive and misogynistic acts, they come to view such behaviour as normal and acceptable. The evidence shows that the psychological and neurobiological aspects of addictive disorders also happen with pornography use. Brain science shows that people addicted to pornography have their maps for normal sexuality rewired and reinforced by pornography to prefer more explicit, graphic images to maintain arousal.

According to Goodson et al. in 2020, with increasingly high use of porn, it becomes more likely that men will be likely to rape, commit sexual assault, be sexually entitled and have hostility towards women. I expect no argument here today that pornography does any kind of good to society and certainly no argument that it does any kind of good for children. We need to realise that not only is the involvement of children in the making of pornography child abuse, but pushing pornography at children or failing, in the drive to make money from the exploitation of human beings, to protect children from exposure to it is a form of child abuse. In the face of the porn industry lobby, though, everyone talks sweet words about protecting children, but very few wish to tackle it head on.

I have said in this House before with regard to other policy areas that we often talk the talk about child protection, but the unwritten yet ever-present caveat seems to be that adults must have their desires satisfied first. Our tolerance of the porn industry pushing its material at children so that adults are in no way impeded from consuming adult content is a classic example of that.

The statistics on the extent of the exposure of children to pornography are frightening. In Great Britain, the average age at which children first saw it was 13 while 38% of 16- to 21-year-olds reported that they had accidentally come across it online. Many more seek it out - 58% of boys and 42% of girls.

In the face of this ongoing pornography threat, I was taken aback by reading the new Coimisiún na Meán media service code, which is out for consultation. The purpose of this code and rules is to ensure that providers of audiovisual on-demand media services that are under the jurisdiction of the State comply with the requirements of the latest EU audiovisual media services directive. Whereas Coimisiún na Meán's draft code is extremely prescriptive with regard to alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco products, often using the term "shall not provide services harmful to children", it blinks when it comes to protecting children from pornography. On this, it says "media service providers of on-demand shall take appropriate measures to ensure that programmes containing content which may impair the physical, mental or moral development of children", going on to list content consisting of pornography. It talks only of appropriate measures, which, surprisingly, do not include mandated that robust age verification procedures be used. When the code and rules come to spelling out the rules there, they give too much leeway to porn providers. The code says that "appropriate measures for the purpose of Section 10.3 shall be proportionate to the potential harm of the programme for children." It says that "without prejudice to the generality of Sections 10.3 and 10.4, the most harmful content, namely gratuitous violence and pornography, shall be subject to the strictest measures, such as parental controls, age assurance tools or other technical measures that achieve an equivalent outcome". Again, this is the inclusion as an option rather than maintaining it as an essential of strict age verification. The code does not mandate age verification tools. It could have said that media services providers shall not provide audiovisual communications containing pornography that can be accessed by children just as it is prescriptive about any discrimination, tobacco or alcohol by contrast.

We want Coimisiún na Meán to be absolutely prescriptive and to insist on a gold standard for age verification. This must involve the uploading of documentation and accompanying photographs and selfies, etc., of a kind that frequently occur when people access State and other services such as bank accounts. If we do not do this, we will find ourselves continually played by the commercial interests in porn. If website or media service providers want to augment this verification with biometric checks, that is fine but that is less accurate, less reliable and more easily gamed by commercial interests - certainly when dealing with young people aged 15 to 18 years.

Coimisiún na Meán also has its online safety code awaiting European Commission approval that will apply specific rules to video-sharing platform services, VSPS. The code only applies to ten named online services that have been designated by Coimisiún na Meánin accordance with the Act as VSPS under the jurisdiction of this State having their EU headquarters in Ireland. That is the first thing - the limitation of the code to those services. If ever there was a need for law with extraterritorial effect, it is law that criminalises those who make porn available without age verification to ensure that children are protected. The online safety code ducks when it comes to a gold standard of documentation as a means of age verification. In speaking of age verification, it includes accepting effective age assurance measures where an age assurance measure means estimating or verifying a user's age. While acknowledging, as the code does in fairness, that self-declaration is not an effective measure of age verification, as we would all know, it is too ready to allow dodgy age assurance measures belonging to a pornography provider that may not distinguish between a 14-year-old and an 18-year-old. Of course, all of this is what the porn industry wants but it is not what parents want. I refer the Minister to recent surveys by Women's Aid that show clearly that the vast majority of people believe that porn is a problem and that it is must be dealt with. There is widespread support for the measures that need to be implemented.

I thank my fellow Independents and Senators McGreehan, Wilson and Davitt for co-sponsoring this Bill and those others here who may support it today. This Bill weaves a path through EU legislation - the Digital Services Act, the e-commerce directive and the audiovisual media services directive. Like slaloming between obstacles on an alpine ski course, I have sought to augment the directives, bearing in mind their repeated aspirations to protect children. I have sought to produce simple legislation with teeth that should, I hope, have broad appeal. After all these years of talking about protecting children online, we have done little or nothing to help parents in that task and history will not look kindly on our neglect. We need to act now.

This legislation essentially criminalises the provision of pornography should the provider not have robust age verification measures in place. Undoubtedly it will not solve all problems. The few will always find workarounds to seek out porn but by placing the onus on the purveyors and those providers who facilitate and profit from it, we will protect the vast majority of young people from it. A pub selling alcohol to those under 18 is liable to lose its licence. The publican must take adequate measures to ensure the customer is of age to consume. This simple and clear legislation seeks to penalise careless purveyors of dangerous material so it establishes an obligation on Internet service providers and app store services to ensure that persons under 18 shall not be able to access pornographic material. It requires website controllers putting up such material to make users go through an age verification process. It provides for the Minister to prescribe a list or class of documents that can be acceptable for that purpose. It allows the outsourcing of age verification to relevant third parties, which the Minister can approve for that purpose. It makes clear that the website controller and app store providers remain liable for any failure to apply the measure and it allows a legal defence for providers where it can be proven that another person facilitated the circumventing of the age verification process. It requires secure storage of any age verification data submitted for a period of five years and ensures that such data may only be accessed where needed for legal proceedings.

The Bill does not address the issue of pornography use among those aged over 18. That is a different issue that in a free society requires a different response. The Bill does not impinge on the wider use of pornography. To address that requires separate action, which should be a matter for another day.

I would like to see this Bill fast-tracked and passed before the next election. I would like to see political parties to show their commitment to protecting young people and to show that they are serious about reducing violent sexual crime in society. At a minimum, should this Bill not pass before the election, I would like to see all major parties, and indeed minor parties, adopt its provisions as part of their proposed political manifestos should they present themselves to the electorate in the near future.

I commend the good work of Coimisiún na Meán, although as I have made clear today, it needs to be more toothsome or perhaps toothful in its approach. It is, of course, limited by its remit with regard to the platforms that have their headquarters based in Ireland. In addition to all that, we need primary legislation. We need criminal law. Coimisiún na Meán can levy fines but we need to think of this as child abuse because that is what making pornography available without strict age verification is, so we need criminal law. We must discuss whether the approach taken in some US states, where civil liability is attached as well to those who fail to protect children through strict age verification, is the way to go.

As we come to the end of another term, there are many things that divide us in this Seanad but on the content of this Bill, I think we can find much common ground. We must protect children and make our society safe for women to walk the streets and go about their daily lives realising that the men around them see them not as objects but in a respectful, empathic way as equal partners in humanity. It is on that basis that I propose this Bill today.