Ireland Is Latest Country to Propose Age-Based Online Porn Block

With less than six weeks gone by since the United Kingdom gave up on its “age verification” law that would have required visitors to online porn sites to prove that they were over 18 years old, the neighboring Republic of Ireland may now try to put a similar age-based porn block into effect, according to a report by the Irish Examiner.  Anne Rabbitte, a member of Ireland’s parliament—or Dáil Éireann—this week said she would soon introduce a bill that would require mobile phone network providers to install filtering software in phones that would block teenagers under 18 from accessing online porn. "It is on the back of everything we have experienced in Ireland over the last 18 months and very high-profile court cases. Parents have been alarmed and they have been asking what legislators can do to help," Rabbitte told the paper. "They feel that they are absolutely powerless." The “court cases” referred to by the legislator involved the murder and sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by two teen boys in Ireland. The two boys were the youngest ever to be charged with murder in Ireland’s history. The horrifying murder, however, was widely blamed on the alleged “appetite for extreme and violent pornography,” found by psychiatrists on one of the boys, who was 13 years old at the time of the murder, according to the Irish Times. Cries to ban porn in the aftermath of violent crimes is not unusual. But no evidence that banning porn leads to a decline in such crimes exists. As AVN.com reported, Nepal recently blocked thousands of porn sites as a response to rising rates of sexual assault in the country. But more than one year later, sex crime rates have continued to rise. One recent study, also covered by AVN.com, found no evidence of a link between watching porn and increased levels of aggression in teen boys.  Though the U.K. gave up on its long-delayed “age verification” law in October—more than two years since it was approved in parliament—both New Zealand and Australia have been moving ahead with their own age-based porn bans. In a particularly Orwellian plan, Australia has proposed using a government-run facial recognition database to determine who watches porn online, and the age of each user.  Photo By BuzzFarmers / Wikimedia Commons