Age verification to access online porn arriving in UK next month

March 7, 2019 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0 Print

London, England, Mar 7, 2019 / 03:36 am (CNA).- Next month, the United Kingdom will roll out new online restrictions in an attempt to protect children under the age of 18 from accessing pornography.

Digital Minister Matt Hancock signed a commencement order for the Digital Economy Act in 2017. After two years of development, the program will be released on April 1.

To view online pornography, internet users will need to confirm their age by entering information from a driver’s license, credit card, or passport. If users do not wish to input their personal information, they may purchase a special ID card, available at thousands of retail shops across the nation for under £10.

Websites that fail to follow the age verification rules may face a nearly $330,000 fine or be blocked by the country’s internet service providers.

Matt Fradd, author of The Porn Myth and creator of the new 21-day porn detox STRIVE, voiced support for increased restrictions surrounding pornography.

“If it’s something as simple as age verification, I’m all for it,” he told CNA. “It just sounds like we are expecting the same thing of people online that we already expect of them offline.”

The most popular verification service is called AgeID and was built by MindGeek, which operates and owns several common pornographic sites.

Some critics of the new UK policy say it violates the privacy and safety of pornography users. Others argue that it does not go far enough to protect minors.

“It may make it harder for children to stumble across pornography, especially in the younger age range, but it will do nothing to stop determined teenagers,” said Dr. Victoria Nash, deputy director of the Oxford Internet Institute, according to BirminghamLive.

Dr. Joss Wright, senior research fellow at the institute, added that the new policy raises “privacy issues – you're requiring people to effectively announce the fact they are looking at this material to the credit card authorities. And there's serious security issues from requiring people to enter their credit card details into untrusted sites.”

The UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said the age verification is a valuable first step, but that other measures need to be taken alongside it.

“The NSPCC is calling for social networks to be required by law to give under-18s safe accounts with extra protections built in, so that children are kept as safe online as they are in the real world,” read a statement from the organization, according to BirminghamLive.

Fradd said the restrictions are enforcing age requirements that are already established offline. He said there is often confusion among parents about the seriousness of material viewed online compared to explicit material accessed in stores or movie theaters.

“Imagine a 17-year-old going to watch 50 Shades of [Grey] and being turned away and within five minutes looking at something a hundred times worse on their phone. So either allow children to watch 50 Shades of Grey and buy pornography from stores, or be consistent and require age verification,” he said.

Children’s access to online pornography has been identified as a significant problem: A 2016 study by internet security company Bitdefender found that about 1 in 10 visitors to porn video sites is under age 10.

Fight the New Drug, an organization that works to fight pornography addiction, has highlighted numerous studies showing negative effects of pornography on underage users, including the creation of addictions, changes in sexual taste, and physical impact on the brain.

“Just more broadly, I would say pornography perverts a child’s understanding of human intimacy and sexual life, which is a very beautiful thing,” Fradd stressed.

“It’s as pernicious as sex is beautiful and human intimacy is worthwhile. Since those two things are beautiful and worthwhile, the corruption of it [in regards to] a child is all together something despicable and horrid.”

 

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Church of England affirms sex is only for heterosexual marriage

January 23, 2020 CNA Daily News 3

London, England, Jan 23, 2020 / 02:05 pm (CNA).- Sex is reserved for married heterosexual couples, new pastoral guidance from the Church of England has affirmed. The new guidance also draws a clear distinction between marriage and civil partnerships, noting that sexual relations are not proper to the latter. 

The guidance, titled “Civil Partnerships – for same sex and opposite sex couples. A pastoral statement from the House of Bishops of the Church of England,” was issued last month in response to a 2019 change to UK law, broadening access to civil partnerships by making them available for heterosexual couples for the first time.

Civil partnerships were created in 2004 for same-sex couples but are legally distinct from marriage. Same-sex couples were given the legal right to marry in the England and Wales in 2013, but civil partnerships remained available to same-sex couples only.

“Sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purposes for human beings,” says the guidance on the issue. “The introduction of same sex marriage, through the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, has not changed the church’s teaching on marriage or same sex relationships.” 

Although the Church of England acknowledges that “many of the provisions in the legislation on civil partnerships are, however, similar to, or identical with, those in marriage law,” the nature of the commitment in a civil partnership is different than that of a marriage.

“In particular, [civil partnerships are] not predicated on the intention to engage in a sexual relationship,” says the guidance.

“There is likely to be a range of circumstances in which people of the same sex or opposite sex choose to register a partnership, including some where there is no intention for the relationship to be expressed through sexual activity.”

The guidance applies only to the Church of England, and not to other branches of the worldwide protestant Anglican Communion.

Since the law’s original passage, some pairs of people who are not romantically involved have entered civil partnerships for tax or benefit purposes.

In the guidance, the Church of England states that because of the “ambiguity” regarding sexual activity in civil partnerships, combined with its teaching on the nature of marriage, it does “not believe that it is possible for the church unconditionally to accept civil partnerships as unequivocally reflecting the teaching of the church.”

The Church of England has previously published policies that seem intended to accommodate modern sexual ethos and gender theory without directly contradicting Scripture and Christian history. The results have sometimes seemed gymnastic.

Although the Church of England accepts both married men and women for ordination to the priesthood and as bishops, it does not conduct or recognize same-sex marriages as marriage. In December 2012, the Church of England permited gay clergy in civil partnernships to become bishops, provided they were living in continence with their partners, that is abstaining from sexual relations. 

“The House [of Bishops] believed it would be unjust to exclude from consideration for the episcopate anyone seeking to live fully in conformity with the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics or other areas of personal life and discipline,” Graham James, Anglican bishop of Norwich, stated in January 2013. 

“All candidates for the episcopate undergo a searching examination of personal and family circumstances, given the level of public scrutiny associated with being a bishop in the Church of England.”

In 2018, the denomination published pastoral guidelines for liturgies concerning the so-called “gender transition” of church members. These new liturgies are intended to affirm and celebrate a person’s shift to a chosen gender identity, and to “to recognize liturgically a person’s gender transition.”

The guidelines, titled Pastoral Guidance for use in conjunction with the Affirmation of Baptismal Faith in the context of gender transition, were approved by the Church of England’s House of Bishops in December 2018, and published shortly afterwards. 

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