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On Jan. 15, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the court’s first big case on the regulation of pornography since 2004. In this case, the court will determine whether states can enact laws requiring pornographic websites to use effective age verification to protect children from harmful and inappropriate content.
As attorneys, we believe that the Supreme Court should rule in favor of Texas and the other 18 states that have already passed similar protections for children. As women, we believe that our daughters, nieces and all young girls deserve to grow up without inadvertently being exposed to the perverted “wild west” of unregulated internet pornography. In our amicus brief to the Supreme Court in this case, we lay out substantial scientific and legal arguments to support this claim, which we are honored to present to readers of the Minnesota Star Tribune here.
This is a landmark case with enormous potential impact, as the Supreme Court has only heard a handful of cases on this topic since 1997, when most American children did not even have independent access to the internet and inventions like high-definition streaming video and the iPhone were still years away. In the 1997 decision striking down the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in Reno v. ACLU, the court reasoned that children did not stumble on internet pornography because it was not as accessible as the radio or television. Since pornography is now more accessible than ever before, anytime and anywhere, this argument is simply no longer tenable, and many states have decided that age-gating laws are a reasonable way to reverse course on this crisis.
In 2004, the court struck down Congress’ next attempt to protect children via the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in Ashcroft v. ACLU. The court suggested that instead of government action, filters could be used by end users to block pornography. While filters can be helpful, they place the burden of keeping harmful content away from children fully on parents and caregivers, rather than on the industry that profits from this content. The experiment with putting this burden solely on parents has been unsuccessful: A 2022 survey of American teens ages 13 to 17 found that nearly three quarters (73%) reported being exposed to pornography before 18 years old.
Even the most dedicated parents struggle to protect their children from the harmful content that “Big Porn” companies have spread across the internet, and children who are mentally and emotionally unequipped to handle explicit and often violent images are stumbling on pornography by accident every day.
Not only has accessibility to pornography increased because of technological advancements since 2004, we now know more about the harms that pornography has on developing minds. Legislators across the country have heard compelling testimony regarding the aftermath of this exposure, including horror stories from innocent children and their parents who are victims of unfettered access to online pornography, as well as from a range of experts who testified about the unique harms children experience from exposure to pornography, and the benefits of laws using age verification technology to protect children.
