On May 12, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) signed into law a bill that requires pornography websites to prompt perspective users to verify their age before being granted access to the site. The legislation is the latest in a growing movement of states that are enacting regulations aimed at protecting minors from sexually explicit content online.
Virginia’s SB 1515 requires websites where at least one third of the content is pornographic to utilize government-issued ID or another type of age verification software to determine that the user’s age is 18 or older before allowing access to the site. The law is scheduled to go into effect on July 1.
The Old Dominion state now joins Utah and Louisiana as the third state this year to implement age verification requirements for porn sites. According to The New York Times, four other states (California, Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi) have also ratified bills restricting minors’ access to porn and social media sites, with 21 additional states introducing legislation to address the issue.
Studies indicate that porn can have particularly devasting consequences on the health of minors. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) has found that “childhood exposure to violent pornography predicts a nearly six-fold increase in self-reported sexually aggressive behavior later in life.” Pornography use by children has also been linked to low academic performance, mental health problems, child-on-child sexual behavior, physical and sexual victimization, higher rates of porn use as adults, and higher rates of purchasing sex from prostitutes.
“Research shows pornography can be extremely harmful to children, as it has negative impacts on the brain and relational development,” Haley McNamara, vice president of NCOSE, told The Washington Stand. “Some studies show that pornography exposure is a tool in grooming, and those exposed are more vulnerable to assault and predatory acts.”
Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, commended the new Virginia law as a step toward protecting minors and society.
“Pornography is a grave evil that exploits women, children, and men who are involved in its creation and erodes the brain cells and consciences of those who consume it,” she told TWS. “The efforts of the people of Virginia to protect minors from this dangerous drug should be commended. Our hope is that the rest of the nation will work to enact laws that similarly protect minors from pornography.”
Research is also emerging showing that pornography undermines adult relationships, which is directly connected to habits that young people form. Mark Butler, a marriage and family therapist and professor at Brigham Young University, and Misha Crawford recently highlighted the research of Dr. Nathan Leonhardt, which has found that porn’s emphasis on “short-term sexual satisfaction (i.e., physical gratification and sexual hedonism)” is “incongruent with the pursuit of long-term sexual quality (i.e., intimacy, attachment, relationship quality).”
Butler further related that his “25 years of clinical observations” indict “pornography for its pervasive scripting of self-gratification-obsessed eroticism, objectification, and promiscuity. Pornography’s scripts, like the sexual revolution, ‘liberate’ sexual coupling, programming participants to obsess over individual erotic experience rather than focus on the person or relationship.”
As Butler and Crawford conclude, Leonhardt emphasizes the important role that parents play in “educat[ing] their children on the importance of emotional and relational factors involved in healthy sexuality which shape long-term sexual quality.” In addition, “Pro-relationship sexual scripts provided by families, churches, and communities can provide a stabilizing scaffolding of alternative messaging to mitigate the influence of pornography’s programming on attitudes and behavior. Ultimately, promoting relationally-focused sexual attitudes, aims, and behaviors will help sexual quality to flourish in relationships — both today and tomorrow.”
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.
