Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Bill
Third Reading--Debate Adjourned
March 28, 2023
Moved third reading of Bill S-210, An Act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material, as amended.
She said: Honourable senators, I rise today at third reading stage of Bill S-210 on protecting young persons from exposure to pornography. I’ve been the sponsor of this initiative for the past two and a half years, and this is the second time that the Senate is debating the bill at third reading. The bill we’re studying was improved by this process.
I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all members of the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, especially the then chair, Senator Mobina Jaffer. I also wish to thank the critic of Bill S-210, Senator Yonah Martin, our law clerk, Marc-André Roy and, in my office, legal experts To-Yen Tran and Jérôme Lussier, for their invaluable work. They believed in the bill.
I supported this bill with conviction because it appealed to my many identities.
I am a mother and my two children are part of the generation that had access to the first free pornography sites. Previously, explicit sexual content was for adults only; suddenly, there was nothing to prevent children from accessing pornography on the internet. At that time, just like today, parents were powerless to address this boundless access and total lack of controls.
I am also a feminist, and I’m concerned that young people’s exposure to pornography undermines gender equality in their intimate relationships. Porn too often encourages and normalizes sexist practices of domination that directly contradict the values we wish to instill in young men and women. According to a report released last week by the U.K. Children’s Commissioner, 47% of young people in England believe that girls expect sex to involve physical aggression, and 42% stated that most girls enjoy acts of sexual aggression.
Finally, for me, who has always believed in the importance of equal and comprehensive sex education in schools, it is clear that the avalanche of porn available online is having harmful effects on young people. Among other problems, teenagers who consume pornography develop unrealistic expectations about their bodies, what is expected of them and what they are supposed to look for in love.
At its core, Bill S-210 is based on the simple idea of protecting children from pornography in the virtual world as we protect them from pornography in the real world.
Twenty years ago, pornography was still largely restricted to adults, even on the internet. The huge influx of free porn sites has been a total game-changer. These companies want to maximize their viewership and they make no attempt to control the age of their users. For example, it is estimated that 14% of the people using Pornhub, a Montreal-based company, are minors who have unlimited access to millions and millions of porn videos that are often violent and degrading.
This is a pressing public health issue because an entire generation is getting their sex education by watching these videos. Studies have demonstrated the risk of trauma, addiction, distorted views of consent and one’s own desires, young girls’ misconceptions and even erectile dysfunction. There is an urgent need to act.
The major innovation contained in Bill S-210 would be to require porn sites to verify a user’s age, failing which they will be subject to a criminal offence. Most importantly, delinquent porn sites, even if they are based outside Canada, would be subject to a blocking order in Canada.
Again, for adults, Bill S-210 doesn’t change anything. All content legally available today will continue to be, once an age verification has occurred, which takes only a few minutes. At the recommendation of a witness, I proposed an amendment during the study in committee that enhances privacy protection for users and their personal information in the age verification mechanisms that will be clarified in the regulations. That amendment was adopted.
Of the 30 witnesses and briefs received by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, 25 supported the bill, including a majority of the legal experts who testified.
The bill has the support of pediatricians, psychiatrists and sexologists, but also of many parents who need help to protect their children. Research in the United Kingdom and Australia show about 80% of parents agree with age verification to stop children from watching porn.
The bill passed unopposed at the committee stage. However, we had interesting and, at times, difficult debates about the effectiveness of the proposed measures.
It won’t be easy, of course. This is a new legislative field, technology changes regularly and some people seem to think that the internet should be exempt from any laws and regulations that apply in the real world.
But that’s no reason to give up. Other countries have acted or are in the process of doing so. Germany and France have already passed laws similar to Bill S-210. The British government is also considering legislation that would require age verification for porn sites. This is a global issue, and Canada must do its part. The more countries that hold porn sites accountable, the more effective the measures will be.
Here is how the Canadian Centre for Child Protection sums up its support for the bill:
The digital nature of online pornography does not and should not mean that society abrogates its responsibilities to children and youth. It makes no sense that a 14-year-old cannot watch an R-rated movie with simulated sex scenes in a movie theatre but can easily access pornography on her phone. We cannot let adult websites dictate the sexual education of Canada’s children.
Like the other members of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, I am aware that Bill S-210 is part of a larger and more complex puzzle. The same applies to alcohol, drugs, gambling and other harmful content or activities from which we want to protect children. There is a role for parents, for education and for legislation. Age verification is part of the solution; it is not the whole solution.
In 2020, the Australian Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs published a report entitled, Protecting the age of innocence, which focused on age verification for online porn. Here is one of its main conclusions:
The Committee acknowledges that age verification is not a silver bullet — some websites containing pornographic material may not be captured, and some determined young people may find ways to circumvent the system. However, when it comes to protecting children from the very real harms associated with exposure to online pornography, the Committee’s strong view is that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You will not be surprised to know that I fully concur with our Australian colleagues.
And for this reason, I believe that Bill S-210 should be sent to the House of Commons where the debate can continue and be enriched. I urge you all to vote for this bill.
Thank you.
Will the honourable senator accept a question from Senator Simons?
Certainly.
When I had the privilege of sitting in on the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee during the evolution of this bill, I raised concerns about the use of facial recognition software as a method of age verification. Could you tell me what the bill lays out as possible ways to verify age that might be less intrusive?
Thank you for your question, Senator Simons.
To be extremely clear, the bill does not include any solutions or age verification options. All of that will be in the regulations. Why did we decide to do it that way? The reason is that the technology is changing very quickly, and we could not include specific solutions, such as using a certain card or form of identification, in the bill because it would become outdated very quickly. Instead, what we did was to establish safeguards to protect the privacy of individuals and customers. Everything else will be set out in the regulations.
However, please know that the strictest regulations in this area require third-party companies to conduct that verification. We are talking about companies that will be approved by the government. We will have companies that will follow the privacy rules, companies that are not the pornography platforms themselves because there is no way that those platforms should be entrusted with the age verification. They already have so much information about what customers are doing, even more than banks have. We do not want to give them even more power.
The issue that you raise about the use of facial recognition is indeed very controversial. It would be quite possible to list in the regulations the approved methods and those methods that are not approved. That is already being done in Germany and will soon be implemented in France and Great Britain. Thank you.
Honourable senators, I also rise today in support of Bill S-210.
First, allow me to warmly thank Senator Miville-Dechêne for her perseverance, rigour and work on this important issue.
Colleagues, if I were to ask you the question: Between protecting young people from the harms of pornography exposure or increasing traffic to one’s online platform, which of these two goals might be a priority for the owner of a commercial pornographic website? That is, choosing between the health and safety of children or the profits from increased traffic? Yes, we can all easily guess the answer. And it is this obvious answer that, in my humble opinion, justifies the relevance of this bill and the urgency to send it to the other place as soon as possible to increase its chance of becoming law.
It is important to note that we have before us an issue on which there is near unanimity on the need to act. Whether in this chamber, in committee, among experts or in families, everyone is clear: Children should never have access to sexually explicit content.
This bill fills a void, and that is crucial given the increasing prominence of technology in our homes and schools. Screens are omnipresent in our living and working spaces. More than ever before, we have a life online, and it will only grow. We sell, we buy, we trade online. Children are learning, playing, interacting, communicating and gaming online. They increasingly have their own smartphones, tablets, laptops and a Wi-Fi or mobile internet connection, and this at a relatively young age. On the other hand, experts are developing advanced techniques to keep them engaged and connected as long as possible.
We hear this concern from parents everywhere, and it is growing from year to year in all socio-economic backgrounds. The management of screens, to which access has multiplied, is the parental challenge of the 21st century, especially after the pandemic of COVID-19.
In this world that is changing before our eyes at a speed unlike anything we’ve ever experienced, parents will have to be given additional tools, which they really need in order to properly fulfill their roles and experience greater peace of mind. Some might argue that it is the responsibility of parents, not the government. On the one hand, I think it’s a shared responsibility. On the other hand, it’s important to realize that when it comes to accessing illegal content, educating and supervising a child in 2023 is a much bigger challenge than it was in my day, with only one TV in the house and my Walkman as a source of entertainment when I went out.
Our children are bombarded from all sides, and they are curious. They are under pressure from others and they want to push the limits, which is quite normal. They are passionate about digital technology. Are we equipping them properly? We also need to help them protect themselves from online content that is harmful to their psychological and emotional well-being.
Once this bill passes, companies that distribute commercial pornography will be required to implement an age verification mechanism before providing access to their content.
That way, as is the case in the real world, only adults would be able to legally access this content, which must be kept away from our children for various reasons. I will come back to this later in my speech.
I’d like to highlight the amendment passed by the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. The amendment ensures greater respect for users’ privacy and protects their personal information. Senator Jaffer and Senator Miville-Dechêne described it in detail during their speeches at report stage.
Colleagues, restrictions on youth access to pornography already exist, and these restrictions are widely accepted in our society, such as access to adult magazines and films and to sex shops, which are restricted to those over 18, and proof of age is required. If something is forbidden in a physical context, don’t we all agree that obviously it should also be forbidden in the virtual world?
To quote Senator Martin:
The same rules should be in place online as well in the real world. For example, accessing explicit material from a store, for a minor, is illegal and heavily enforced by store owners, requiring proof of identification.
Adults are allowed to purchase alcoholic beverages. At the Société des alcools du Québec, the same logic applies to online sales as applies to in-store sales. In store, the buyer’s age will be verified if necessary and, for online sales, mandatory proof of age is required upon delivery of a product purchased via their website. For the purpose of this speech, I verified and found that the Société québécoise du cannabis website applies the same principle to the delivery of its products. No delivery can be made to anyone under the age of 21, even if the products have already been paid for.
How do we deal with the online world now that it has merged with the real world, for which most of our laws were designed? Now, these two worlds coexist and our laws and regulations must take that into account. They must reflect this new reality and evolve.
Colleagues, by ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canada has committed, as set out in Article 19, to:
. . . take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse . . . .
The experts are clear on that and I agree. Giving children access to pornography is essentially child abuse. The negative psychological impacts have been documented for years and the findings are all the same. In this chamber and in committee, we have heard solid arguments on the negative short- and long-term effects of exposure to pornography, which we know often includes violent images.
Béatrice Copper-Royer, a psychologist who specializes in child and adolescent psychology, is very clear. She said, and I quote:
It is disastrous for a child to happen upon these images or videos by accident. It is a violation. It destabilizes them and they choose not to talk about it because they can sense it is terribly wrong.
She goes on to say the following, again about youth, and I quote:
The older ones choose to look at this content for a laugh or to try to get away with something in a world where there is not much you can’t get away with. It is also disastrous in that these images give them a violent and degrading view of sexuality and trivialize violent sexual behaviour.
During the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs’ study of a previous version of this bill, Laila Mickelwait, founder of the #Traffickinghub movement and the Justice Defense Fund, said the following:
. . . we have over 40 years of peer-reviewed research that demonstrates the harm pornography does to children who are viewing this content. We talk about viewing and doing. A study was done which showed that over 88% of mainstream pornography films contain sexual violence. When children view this content, research has shown that it does something in their brain that creates permission-giving beliefs, which then enable them to more easily act out in sexually violent ways.
It is troubling, to say the least. More troubling still is the fact that every study says the same thing, in other words, that there are definitely serious risks for children.
Being exposed to this type of content at an early age is undoubtedly a form of violence, of abuse. It deeply distorts the representations of a child in his or her relationship with the other, in the creation of his or her sexual identity, in the nature of his or her relationships with others. And then, of course, it has contributed to a banalization of sexuality, violence and a hypersexualization of society.
Honourable senators, my speech is certainly not about taking a moral position on pornography. What an adult does legally in his or her spare time is clearly none of my business, but what is our business, our responsibility, is to ensure that our children are protected and that we maximize their chances of growing up in healthy environments. This is a responsibility that we all share — as parents, as a society, as a country and here in this room. We must act. We must legislate.
To conclude, I think that not acting on this is equal to saying that we’re fine with our youth having access to porn, even though we know it has serious consequences. So, I guess the question is this: If it makes so much sense, why hasn’t it been done yet? We can’t hide behind the argument that it’s too complicated. We are now able to make it happen. We are able to do it, so let’s do it.
