When parents ask Chris McKenna at what age they should give their child a smartphone, he has a ready answer: “the age you want them to see porn.”
The former youth pastor launched Protect Young Eyes, a nonprofit that teaches technology safety to schools, businesses, churches and parents, in 2015 after becoming concerned about the disappearing barriers between pornography and young people.
“I was watching for the first time in human history as we put the Internet in children’s pockets,” he said, “and it terrified me.”
Since then, the average age at which children are first exposed to pornography has tended to fall. The researchers estimated that in 2021 it was somewhere around 11 o’clock.
As data continues to show the harms of porn viewing, particularly for children, support for stricter legal limits on pornographers has grown. McKenna’s job description as head of Protect Young Eyes has also expanded: it now includes policy advocacy.
In 2019, McKenna testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committeerecommending that lawmakers hold tech companies accountable for making security filters and parental controls on their devices easier to use.
This year, McKenna consulted with lawmakers and testified before several state lawmakers in support of new age verification laws, which require pornographic websites to verify that their users are 18 or older. Seven states – Texas, Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas and Virginia – have passed age verification laws this year.
In Texas, McKenna helped lawmakers draft what became House Bill 1181, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed over the summer. The measure was immediately challenged on First Amendment grounds, and a district court judge struck it down, citing free speech and privacy concerns. The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is appealing the decision.
Paxton’s wife, Texas State Senator Angela Paxton, was the original sponsor of HB 1181. The Paxtons are members of Prestonwood Baptist Church, a megachurch in Plano. A Prestonwood pastor, Mike Buster, worked with Paxton and Chris McKenna on drafting and advocating for the bill in Texas.
The mechanics of each age verification law differ by state. In Louisiana, pornographic websites automatically redirect visitors to a state-run website where they must upload their credentials. Most other states require pornographic websites to collect and verify user identification information themselves.
But there is no doubt that laws have limited access to online pornography, whether directly or indirectly.
Pornhub, the nation’s largest pornographer, is now blocking access to its site for users in at least four states (Utah, Arkansas, Virginia and Mississippi) in an effort to evade requirements to collect user ID data. users. Four months after the law took effect in Louisiana last January, a Pornhub spokesperson told CNN visits to their site from Louisiana IP addresses decreased by 80 percent.
Christian ministries like Focus on family And Eyes of the Alliance For decades they have campaigned for stricter limits on obscenity in entertainment and legislation, often without any secular support. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a nonsectarian organization with Christian roots under the name Morality in Media, has also come out in favor of regulation.
Sometimes caricatured as prudes or scolds, Christian anti-porn advocates base their advocacy on the biblical teaching that sex is sacred and that every human person, as well as their body, should be treated with respect and dignity. (Answers to new House Speaker Mike Johnson’s use of Covenant Eyes highlights the gap between how evangelicals and secular culture approach the use of pornography.)
But McKenna and other Christian anti-porn advocates say that creating or watching porn isn’t just a sin for Christians. They believe that, like all other sins, it is destructive to everyone.
Research keep on going to prove it, which moved the anti-porn stance closer to the mainstream. So far, 17 states adopted resolutions calling pornography a “public health crisis.”
McKenna hopes, however, that more Christians will take an interest in this issue. “I think church leaders should come together en masse to support legislation to create safer digital spaces for children,” he said. “Families need more help.”
Some Christians and conservatives, however, do not support a legislative approach. XXXChurch, a provocatively named ministry that helps people struggling with pornography addiction, states on its website that “blaming the porn industry for our problems or relying on legislation to protect us does not does not work “.
Others worry that age verification laws are an invasion of privacy or that the responsibility for protecting children from pornography falls on their parents, not the government.
Steve Demetriou is a parent of two young sons with a new baby on the way. He is also a state representative from Ohio, where he recently introduced an age verification bill. Demetriou is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and said his faith, along with prodding from a Catholic legislative aide, motivated him to introduce the bill.
“It is already illegal in Ohio to distribute pornography to children,” Demetriou said. “We’re just bringing this into the digital age and creating common sense barriers online.”
Demetriou says he is sensitive to First Amendment concerns about the Ohio bill, which provides criminal penalties for using AI-manipulated images of a real person in pornographic videos without the knowledge or without the person’s consent. He said he plans to ask the Ohio Casino Control Commission how it verifies the age of its patrons without violating free speech or privacy laws.
“We need to make it as difficult for children … to watch porn online as it is to place sports bets or buy cigarettes from minors,” Demetriou said.
Danny Huerta is a licensed professional counselor and vice president of parenting and youth at Focus on the Family, where he oversees Branch, publishing reviews and media assessments of the conservative organization. He said age verification laws are a “good start” in efforts to protect children from online pornography.
“I think it might help some,” Huerta said. “It still doesn’t replace parents putting filters in place…and being very intentional in their conversations with kids.”
Huerta, who has also been counseling families in his private practice for 20 years, said he has seen an alarming increase over the past decade in the number of children viewing pornography, as well as a worrying increase in the degree of deviance in the pornography, including sexual violence. , sexual activity with animals and even sexual attraction to blood.
Huerta often recommends that parents install porn-blocking software on their children’s devices, even though it can slow down system processing. Products such as Internet Nanny, OpenDNS FamilyShield, BrowseControlAnd Angel of the Internet propose to block certain websites identified as containing “adult content”. Huerta is particularly optimistic about Canopyfiltering software that uses AI to know in real time whether an image is pornographic and can block it instantly.
Still, Huerta said filters and even age verification laws won’t solve everything. “Let’s say there’s an 18-year-old brother or an 19-year-old accessing (porn). Kids can always stumble upon it,” he said.
That’s why Huerta focuses primarily on helping parents encourage their children to choose to look away from pornographic images themselves. For this, Focus on the Family has created a “telephone contract” model that parents and children can complete together as they negotiate technological boundaries and consequences.
Protect Young Eyes’ McKenna said the responsibility for protecting children from pornography cannot and should not fall solely on parents. He’s particularly concerned about children whose parents don’t have the time, knowledge or motivation to monitor their children’s technology use.
Instead, McKenna believes tech companies should have a responsibility to make their devices as safe for children as possible. In Texas, he helped craft companion legislation to the Age Verification Act that would have set requirements for stricter default settings and simpler parental controls for device creators like Apple and Google.
“It currently takes over 30 steps to properly set up parental controls on an iPhone,” McKenna told federal lawmakers in 2019. He urged Texas lawmakers to force device makers to simplify that process and set the default settings on any device that can be used by children as strict as possible. This could include blocking access to the Internet or certain applications during school hours or overnight.
Texas lawmakers “ran out of time” to pass this bill, McKenna said, but he believes focusing policy efforts at the “device level” is the best path forward.
“We’ve created models of living and learning that require kids to be online,” McKenna said. “Each device knows when a child is using it. …Shouldn’t the default version of this device be its safest possible version? Isn’t that how we treat everything children use: cribs, car seats, bikes, playgrounds? »
Some advocates say they favor device-screening laws because age-verification laws risk being overturned on constitutional grounds, such as in Texas.
Still, Protect Young Eyes’ McKenna hopes that Texas’ age verification law will survive legal scrutiny and ultimately prove useful, and that other states will consider similar measures.
“It has to work at some level,” he said.
