UK Government will not block porn

It was never going to work and whilst I agreed wholeheartedly with the intention I'm glad it's been scrapped.

As a society, specifically in the UK but I get the impression it's happening elsewhere as well, we seem to be ever more reliant on Government looking after us. We seem to be less and less prepared to take responsibility for our own responsibility in terms of guiding and monitoring our children's behaviour.

My children are not yet there but I'm perfectly happy with setting up blockers and filters within my own home, that's as much as I could hope for of the Government in any event. It's far more important to educate my children, they will come into contact with porn, I have no doubt about that, the best I can hope is that they are educated as to what it is and why it is harmful both to them and to those involved in the industry.

 

Banning things doesn't make them go away.

 

I don't know if it's getting worse. Books have been restricted since printing began, videos and films are restricted and certified by the BBFC (state censor) in a far more restrictive way than most other countries (it's illegal to release a video that hasn't been reviewed and certified by the BBFC, apart from a few exemptions for educational/instructional videos). There has always been quite a prominent 'church ladies' prudish element to British society, and a repressive and elitist attitude towards entertainment and art. UK P usage is the worst in Europe, though, so if this was supposed to make us all chaste it certainly hasn't worked.

The law was by all accounts not terribly well thought through, but I am not opposed to a similar more workable idea, in general. I think that ISPs might begin to restrict P sites voluntarily, for example, if there was a public campaign persuading them to. I believe a few mobile networks already do.

 

Freedom of expression... What a joke.

 

It's not the censorship I object to, it's the fact that I find more and more people want the Government to do it for them. It's the same with schools, and other youth groups, parents seem to have an unrealistic expectation of what they are there to do, children learn more from their parents and wider family that they ever learn at school!

Some people I think were happy to sit back and think, I don't need to worry about my kids and porn, the Government is going to do something about it.

 

I've been reading stories about this porn age verification for some time and this latest twist doesn't surprise me in the least. It might have provided a barrier to some of the more prominent sites, but it would simply be impossible to stop people finding porn if they wanted to given the sheer number of sites and could easily be bypassed with a VPN and no doubt many other ways.

I am not in favour of the government stepping in like this anyway and porn blocking tools are readily available to anyone who wants them.

As a UK taxpayer, I would be very interested to know how much of my money has been spunked up the wall on this failed project.

 

We need a regulation and protection from the government that will protect our children and even ourselves from the evil porn industry. We are too weak and too stupid to resist it.
Freedom is not always a good thing

 

It wouldn't have fixed anything anyway. Websites were already offering free vpn's for porn access, and society currently doesn't see pornography as an issue.

 

Age restrictions placed on pornography use have been completely negated and bypassed with the advent of the high speed internet era, back when you had to go to a adult store to get porn we found it hard as kids to get hold of it, now kids as young as 4-5 years old have instant access to all the porn in the world at any time. Something has to be done, this was the first positive step towards doing something about it, only for it to fall flat. So disappointing

 

Say that the perfect age-barrier-porn-blocker was made and implemented and all children in the entire world were completely unable to see porn until they were adults.

Would that actually fix things? No. As soon as that blocker is off, you'd have young adults who never learned to resist porn suddenly flooded with it. You'd still get addiction problems, the same with drugs and alcohol.

Is it good for kids to access porn? Ofc not. But I also echo the sentiment expressed here that the better answer is for parents to be real with their kids about the world and to help them find the tools and build their characters into people who have the strength to resist these kinds of temptations.

Hiding porn inside a locked cupboard doesn't develop character and addiction-fighting-tools.

 

I agree with you in part, however I disagree on your argument that restricting porn from kids wont help, anecdotally we have noticed a trend amongst nofap users that those who started watching porn at a young age before any real sexual experience find it takes considerably longer to reboot than those who started watching in their adult life, and are much more prone to pied and anxiety issues as a result of their porn use than older users. To me this sounds like more damage is done if porn use starts in younger years. By restricting access to porn for kids, we could drastically reduce the reboot times and failure rates of those who do start watching later in life, which is surely a good thing

 

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I also kind of both agree and disagree with you. This issue really isn't simple, is it?

Obviously not having porn around would be awesome, and that coupled with good parenting would be the best. I think we can agree on that.

Right now though, the data we can draw upon to form conclusions from as it specifically relates to porn users is not that strong. But I know of a science experiment that backs the reasons for what I wrote: Rat Park. It is not a perfect comparison. It's about rats and morphine, not humans and porn. Yet there is enough overlap to show my case has merit.

A healthy and nurturing environment is so crucial. That is what we really need to focus on. I'm for blocking porn access to minors, but I still believe that it's a band-aid solution that doesn't address the real issues. And what about questions like "if we make the issue go away, will parents just get more lazy in educating and raising their children?"

 

Lol it really isnt. The problem with relying on parents educating kids is that the nature of kids is directly in opposition to this approach, my parents warned me about the dangers of drinking excessive alcohol and used to let me have a single drink at family occasions to help me develop a responsible attitude towards it, wanna guess the state I got in first time I was at a friends house with booze? I believe my parents did everything they could to educate me but ultimately as a 15-16 year old kid if I could get wasted I would, always, as wasted as I possibly could, it wasn't until I got older that the lessons my parents taught me as a kid started to sink in. I believe the same thing applies to porn, you cant educate young boys to not find pornography to be a very alluring pastime, and when pretty much all of mainstream media and science seems to view porn and masturbation as a totally healthy activity, combined with the fact that your parents are lame killjoys that have always been old and boring, means that it's an extremely hard issue to deal with. I'm generally opposed to government intervention on anything, but porn is my exception, I'd love to see it criminalized as the prostitution that it is truth be told, porn cards that require ID seemed like the next best solution to me

 

But the difference here is that their attitude and education has affected your lifelong relationship with alcohol. My experience was very similar, I was brought up in a family where having alcoholic drinks was common, wine with Sunday dinner, a beer in the evening or a whisky. The thing was a never saw my parents wasted, I saw them enjoy alcohol in a relaxed setting. Did this stop me getting wasted in my late teens and early 20's, no, but can I now enjoy alcohol responsibly, yes absolutely.

Let's not kid ourselves that our children will not access pornography, I managed it in the pre-internet era, and they will today, with or without Government control.

Now I can't educate them in the same way by setting a good example and so I will have to consider how else to address this, but I believe the responsibility for educating my children lies first and foremost with me and not with the Government.

 

The government can restrict pornography if it were a priority and - especially - if there was an effort to clamp down on it globally. Start fining a few ISPs, arrest a few people, make a big deal of enforcing the law and most people would be too frightened to work around the ban (even if it were relatively easy to do).

I'm not sure it's the best use of government resources though. And it is far too socially acceptable for such draconian measures to be acceptable (at least not in Europe/the US).

 

You cannot expect kids they should resist watching porn!

 

So I guess the government can’t stop cigarette sales to minors, alcohol sales to minors, the mailing of tobacco to minors, minors from using alcohol websites, shut down gambling websites, shut down websites like Backpage, or stop child porn on the ‘dark web’. Of course the government (at least the US government) can and has done all of that. All this tells me is that the forces that want to destroy our society with porn are still firmly in control.

 

Protecting people from dangers never works.
It does not work for same reason social protection in general does not work well.
If you decide that hunger is horrible and decide to protect people from hunger, and give the free food everywhere, they die of hunger the moment government is not there. They do not learn to provide food for themselves.
If you decide that violence is horrible and decide to protect people from violence, they suffer violence the moment government is not there. And they never learn to fend for themselves and protect themselves.
The moment you take away some responsibility from the individual and make it a social responsibility - you are trying to give the fish to the person instead of teaching him/her how to fish.
Then why are we surprised when millions of people line up screaming "give us fish", we are hungry.

Parents take no responsibility for well being of their kids, because "they will learn that in school" well they dont, they grow up saying - give me, give me, give me!!
Then they hit a brick wall called "reality" and get very depressed and angry, that no one is protecting, feeding and keeping them happy.

They say - "Give Us Fish!"

 

It should automatically be blocked through your internet service provider and through your mobile phone provider. If you want to unblock it through your internet service provider you can do so by signing in to your internet service provider account online and changing it, or you can change your dns. If you want to unblock it on your mobile phone you can go on your mobile phone account online and turn off adult lock by typing in an ID code using a driving license, provisional or passport. I'm sure some mobile phone providers automatically do this already.

But I feel like the two of these should be mandatory. It achieves the same as what the UK government was trying to achieve with the porn block, stopping young eyes from easily being able to stumble across pornographic content online.

There's no doubt pornographic content is far too easily accessible online. It's really shocking young kids can go on a smart phone, computer or other device and all that is so easily accessible to them.

Having those two systems in place that I mentioned above would at the very least keep the majority of very young eyes from easily being able to stumble across explicit websites online. But if you're over 18 and want to look at porn then it isn't much hassle at all to access it.