If freedom means seeing our kids defiled by porn, I opt out

Freedom of expression is extremely precious. People all over the world who don’t have it envy those of us who do and some are even prepared to die for it. And one of the many almost miraculous features of the internet is that it has brought freedom of expression to countless millions, even those in the least free societies. But one wonders if this noble ideal should embrace the freedom to deluge our computers and our children’s minds with ceaseless pornography. I doubt that those who face torture and death in prison in the cause of freedom of expression would think so, or would think they should die so that 10-year-olds can stare at images of men and women coupling with animals.

The internet is awash with such stuff, and a great deal worse, and many children see it. In this country, six out of 10 households where there are children have no filters or firewalls in place to block out “adult content”, as it is quaintly called, and 52% of British children report having unsupervised access to computers in their bedrooms.

It would hardly be surprising if, as research last year suggested, one in three 10-year-olds has watched pornography online, 81% of 14 to 16-year-olds have done so regularly and 70% of parents of children who say they watch porn are happily unaware of it.

These figures are given in a report published a few days ago by a cross-party inquiry led by Claire Perry MP into online child protection. The group came together to examine the current system and review the arguments for and against network-level filtering.

The big question surrounding internet porn is whether to have opt-in or opt-out — whether to leave individuals who want to avoid adult content on their computers to opt out by asking for a personal filter, or whether to require network service providers to block all such content and leave those who want access to opt in by asking for it.

Opting in to pornography would be extremely simple to do (mobile phone service providers already have a filtering system for people under 18) and would have the obvious advantage of combining protection with freedom.

At first glance it is hard to think of any argument against it. With opt-in, people over 18 would be as free as they are now to watch on demand whatever bouncing bosoms or seriously depraved filth they fancy, but those who don’t want it would not need to have anything to do with it. They wouldn’t have to worry that their children were watching it secretly or clicking on to it by mistake.

What precious freedom is at risk from that? It is what the inter-party report has recommended and last week the Labour party came out in support of it. However, the government (in the person of the unlucky culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt) is against it. Last week Hunt said an opt-in would infringe civil liberties and that later this year he will publish plans for an opt-out system under which all internet service providers must ask each of their web users if they want access to pornography and to tick a yes or a no box accordingly.

This is strange coming from a Conservative. There can be no doubt that if Hunt’s aim is to protect children as far as possible from internet pornography (as David Cameron has eloquently promised to do) then this is the wrong choice, as opting out is obviously a far less efficient way of protecting them than opting in. One wonders what, exactly, his objection is.

The only one I can think of, as far as civil liberties go, applies just as much to Hunt’s opt-out and it is that in both cases a person wanting to watch pornography must identify himself or herself to the internet service provider.

Given what we know about internet security, it is almost certain that lists of such people will be kept and copied and will become available to others sooner or later. If the price to pay includes being on some future “list of shame”, this could be enough to deter some porn fanciers from opting in and that might constitute a constraint upon their freedom.

However, I cannot say I have much sympathy. If porn fanciers think there is nothing wrong with watching porn — and it seems that porn sites are far and away the most visited sites on the internet — then they should feel no embarrassment about being known to do so.

In any case, the point is that from a civil liberties view Hunt’s proposal is no better than that of the parliamentary group. This is odd coming from a Conservative minister in a Conservative-led coalition — neither conservative in the civil liberties sense nor conservative in terms of family values.

Where there’s muck there’s brass and it is hard not to feel — as Labour and others have suggested — that money lies at the bottom of all this. Internet porn and its related advertising are super-profitable and it would be quite a blow to those profits if the number of internet hits was suddenly to drop — perhaps substantially — as a result of government legislation.

It’s not surprising that the industry strongly opposes opt-in. Last week two shadow ministers said in its support that Cameron’s closeness to Google, the internet giant, means the coalition is too weak to take adequate action over “this modern-day form of pollution”. The government ought to answer that accusation.

Underlying all this fuss is a shared assumption that pornography really does pollute children’s minds and perhaps adults’ minds too, and that the explosion of pornography everywhere has contributed to a hyper-sexualisation of society, an obsession with body image, an increase in violence, the objectification of people and a trivialisation of relationships.

I share that view, but one has to admit that the evidence is so far extremely weak . No causal links have yet been established between pornography and, for example, violent sexual crime or increased promiscuity, despite what common sense suggests. Common sense can often be wrong and, as Bertrand Russell unkindly said, it “is the metaphysics of savages”; at any rate it certainly isn’t science.

We don’t know how pornography affects children, and we can’t even agree on what ought to be rated “adult material”. All the same, there is absolutely no reason why, in the bogus name of freedom, we and our children should be exposed to any of it. Unless, that is, we specifically choose to.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk