Private Members' Business ·
Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act
“I want the House to pass this bill. It requires age checks on porn sites. Watching pornography harms children's brains and leads to addiction and abuse. Stores already ban selling explicit material to kids, and we should do the same thing online.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the great people of southwest Saskatchewan. I want to thank my colleague from just north of me in the province, the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, for sponsoring this Senate bill to address the issue of kids accessing pornography online. As a father of three, including two teenagers, I appreciate seeing all the good work she has done over the years to support children and families. She lives with the modern reality facing parents because she is a mother of young children herself. Raising children who are minors is something each of us has in common with many others in the House, from all parties. That is the most important thing we should be focusing on here today. As parents, we want the best for our kids. We try to give them everything they need to have their best start in life. Our goal is to help them become adults who can reach their full potential for health, happiness, success and good character. While they are in the process of growing up, we want to keep them away from anything that is harmful to their development. It is an important part of our job to protect them when they are most vulnerable and too young to fully understand how certain things can negatively affect them and sometimes have a permanent impact, for life. As children enter their teen years, parents have to guide them through new challenges, including relationships and sexual development. I’ll quickly quote something from a book called Every Young Man’s Battle, which is written from a faith-based perspective to help teens think about these issues. The authors say to the young reader, “One of the most difficult assignments you’ll ever have is to integrate your sexuality with the emotional, spiritual, social, and relational person you want to be.” They goes on to talk about having a healthy outlook on sexuality, which is integrated and balanced with other parts of our lives, including our emotional, relational and spiritual needs. This is a special part of how we are made. We know it is supposed to be a beautiful expression of love, which should lead us toward personal fulfillment, but instead of following that type of path, pornography easily takes a young person in the opposite direction and quickly creates some distorted impressions. Especially during early puberty, or even before it begins, the damage of exposure to pornography can cause serious problems. One of those problems that can develop at a more formative time is addiction. As time goes on, now with more than one generation growing up with online pornography, we hear from professional and popular discussions about things like porn addiction and sex addiction. Like other forms of addiction, it has negative effects on the person experiencing it, but there are also ways for other people to be harmed, not only relationally but physically as well. That is why Bill S-209 starts off by saying that its purpose is to protect public health and public safety. To do that, it would bring forward a simple solution by requiring age verification. This is really nothing new. The law already has an age limit of 18 years old for selling or distributing sexually explicit material. We do not allow minors to access these things at a physical store in the real world, and having this rule in place has helped to achieve some good in the process. In some ways, it is similar to the idea of setting an age for people to buy alcohol, but everybody knows that in practice, the situation is very different when it comes to the Internet. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection has said that children as young as eight and nine years old can easily come across sexually graphic material online. In Alberta, a separate study of adolescents found that one-third had been exposed to pornography by the age of 10. There are people who will simply say that this is just boys being boys, and their curious minds will find this material regardless, but many people’s experience, and a huge amount of research, shows that it is a bigger problem than that, and I am going to explain why. The human brain is growing and not finished developing until the age of 26 or thereabouts. To put it simply, while a person’s brain is being wired and developing until they are 26, everything that happens in those first 26 years of their life goes a long way to determining who they are, because it can make a difference in how they develop at the biological level. Along with the psychological effects on mental health, we are also talking about experiences that can result in physical changes in the brain while it is still in the middle of development. Viewing pornography is obviously very different from having sex with a real person. Besides the direct experience, there is something different happening with the brain. Studies have shown that people who are addicted to pornography have a similar brain pattern to people who are addicted to cocaine. Now, take that brain pattern and place it in a preteen or teenage boy or girl, and we have a recipe for disaster. It creates an addiction and a dependency that they will continue to seek from now on, and this is happening at a crucial stage when they are forming their self-image or dealing with insecurities. At the same time, they are learning new ways to handle relationships with their peers and having their first experiences, which shape how they will handle intimate relationships when they are older. Here are some more stats. When intentionality is questioned, 44% of teens say they looked it up on purpose, but as many as 58% say they encountered porn accidentally. The rates of intentional consumption are actually higher among respondents who identify as LGBT. For that group, some studies show it was 50% higher or could even be 66% higher. We have these youth, who are already vulnerable and seeking affirmation for who they are, exposed to sexually explicit, graphic and violent material while working through deeply personal questions of identity. That higher rate of consumption actually puts them at even more risk than their peers of being victimized. Pornography also creates erratic behaviour and false expectations of what sex is. I am going to give a couple of examples of such behaviour, and what I am about to say is quite disturbing. There was a case of a 12-year-old schoolboy who raped his seven-year-old sister after watching hard-core porn with his buddies on an Xbox. After viewing this content, he wanted to try to do the things in real life that he was watching online. There was another instance in 2019 of a 14-year-old boy sexually assaulting his eight-year-old stepsister after watching pornography on a regular basis. These are both very shocking and disturbing cases, and it is a mistake to dismiss them as a couple of isolated incidents. They are alarm bells for a much larger problem. Stories like this are less surprising if we realize what is happening beneath the surface. When studies on this issue have been done, they have found that 38% of teens reported viewing porn that depicts rape, choking or deliberately causing someone pain; 21% agreed that “most people” like to be spanked, hit or slapped during sex; and the numbers get worse among those who purposely watch violent pornography. Those numbers skyrocket to 80% for teenagers who watch porn at least three times a week, yet only 30% say that some form of consent was given by the people in the videos. Pornography is destroying how healthy relationships are viewed. It is creating massively false expectations for intimate partners about what is deemed to be normal conduct in the bedroom. This is something that is hard to overcome. We could ask any cocaine addict how hard it is to overcome that addiction and then imagine what it is like dealing with this addiction. When we have expectations and ideas being influenced by violent pornography, it is not difficult to imagine how this can contribute to abusive relationships or domestic violence. All of this is why I support Bill S-209 to restrict access to pornography for young people. We can take action and require age verification. We can help to prevent and reduce early exposure among the future generations. We can take a simple step to fight some of the worst impacts of online pornography. It is impossible for government to replace the role of parents, and it should never try to do that, but it is also true that parents are looking for help to protect their kids online, and the government knows that. It says as much when it promotes Bill C-34 to restrict access to social media. I find it interesting that we are debating both of these bills at the same time. Hopefully, it helps my colleagues on the government side understand where this bill is coming from and support this one as well. There are real concerns with young people using social media, which I share as a parent, but it is also likely that the negative effects of online pornography are even substantially worse, yet Bill C-34 would do nothing to address an issue of protecting the innocence of kids and youth from material that they should never see. Parenting has always been a tough job, but it has only gotten more complicated in a digital world. The least we can do for them is to pass Bill S-209.”
Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the great people of southwest Saskatchewan. I want to thank my colleague from just north of me in the province, the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, for sponsoring this Senate bill to address the issue of kids accessing pornography online. As a father of three, including two teenagers, I appreciate seeing all the good work she has done over the years to support children and families. She lives with the modern reality facing parents because she is a mother of young children herself. Raising children who are minors is something each of us has in common with many others in the House, from all parties. That is the most important thing we should be focusing on here today. As parents, we want the best for our kids. We try to give them everything they need to have their best start in life. Our goal is to help them become adults who can reach their full potential for health, happiness, success and good character. While they are in the process of growing up, we want to keep them away from anything that is harmful to their development. It is an important part of our job to protect them when they are most vulnerable and too young to fully understand how certain things can negatively affect them and sometimes have a permanent impact, for life. As children enter their teen years, parents have to guide them through new challenges, including relationships and sexual development. I’ll quickly quote something from a book called Every Young Man’s Battle, which is written from a faith-based perspective to help teens think about these issues. The authors say to the young reader, “One of the most difficult assignments you’ll ever have is to integrate your sexuality with the emotional, spiritual, social, and relational person you want to be.” They goes on to talk about having a healthy outlook on sexuality, which is integrated and balanced with other parts of our lives, including our emotional, relational and spiritual needs. This is a special part of how we are made. We know it is supposed to be a beautiful expression of love, which should lead us toward personal fulfillment, but instead of following that type of path, pornography easily takes a young person in the opposite direction and quickly creates some distorted impressions. Especially during early puberty, or even before it begins, the damage of exposure to pornography can cause serious problems. One of those problems that can develop at a more formative time is addiction. As time goes on, now with more than one generation growing up with online pornography, we hear from professional and popular discussions about things like porn addiction and sex addiction. Like other forms of addiction, it has negative effects on the person experiencing it, but there are also ways for other people to be harmed, not only relationally but physically as well. That is why Bill S-209 starts off by saying that its purpose is to protect public health and public safety. To do that, it would bring forward a simple solution by requiring age verification. This is really nothing new. The law already has an age limit of 18 years old for selling or distributing sexually explicit material. We do not allow minors to access these things at a physical store in the real world, and having this rule in place has helped to achieve some good in the process. In some ways, it is similar to the idea of setting an age for people to buy alcohol, but everybody knows that in practice, the situation is very different when it comes to the Internet. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection has said that children as young as eight and nine years old can easily come across sexually graphic material online. In Alberta, a separate study of adolescents found that one-third had been exposed to pornography by the age of 10. There are people who will simply say that this is just boys being boys, and their curious minds will find this material regardless, but many people’s experience, and a huge amount of research, shows that it is a bigger problem than that, and I am going to explain why. The human brain is growing and not finished developing until the age of 26 or thereabouts. To put it simply, while a person’s brain is being wired and developing until they are 26, everything that happens in those first 26 years of their life goes a long way to determining who they are, because it can make a difference in how they develop at the biological level. Along with the psychological effects on mental health, we are also talking about experiences that can result in physical changes in the brain while it is still in the middle of development. Viewing pornography is obviously very different from having sex with a real person. Besides the direct experience, there is something different happening with the brain. Studies have shown that people who are addicted to pornography have a similar brain pattern to people who are addicted to cocaine. Now, take that brain pattern and place it in a preteen or teenage boy or girl, and we have a recipe for disaster. It creates an addiction and a dependency that they will continue to seek from now on, and this is happening at a crucial stage when they are forming their self-image or dealing with insecurities. At the same time, they are learning new ways to handle relationships with their peers and having their first experiences, which shape how they will handle intimate relationships when they are older. Here are some more stats. When intentionality is questioned, 44% of teens say they looked it up on purpose, but as many as 58% say they encountered porn accidentally. The rates of intentional consumption are actually higher among respondents who identify as LGBT. For that group, some studies show it was 50% higher or could even be 66% higher. We have these youth, who are already vulnerable and seeking affirmation for who they are, exposed to sexually explicit, graphic and violent material while working through deeply personal questions of identity. That higher rate of consumption actually puts them at even more risk than their peers of being victimized. Pornography also creates erratic behaviour and false expectations of what sex is. I am going to give a couple of examples of such behaviour, and what I am about to say is quite disturbing. There was a case of a 12-year-old schoolboy who raped his seven-year-old sister after watching hard-core porn with his buddies on an Xbox. After viewing this content, he wanted to try to do the things in real life that he was watching online. There was another instance in 2019 of a 14-year-old boy sexually assaulting his eight-year-old stepsister after watching pornography on a regular basis. These are both very shocking and disturbing cases, and it is a mistake to dismiss them as a couple of isolated incidents. They are alarm bells for a much larger problem. Stories like this are less surprising if we realize what is happening beneath the surface. When studies on this issue have been done, they have found that 38% of teens reported viewing porn that depicts rape, choking or deliberately causing someone pain; 21% agreed that “most people” like to be spanked, hit or slapped during sex; and the numbers get worse among those who purposely watch violent pornography. Those numbers skyrocket to 80% for teenagers who watch porn at least three times a week, yet only 30% say that some form of consent was given by the people in the videos. Pornography is destroying how healthy relationships are viewed. It is creating massively false expectations for intimate partners about what is deemed to be normal conduct in the bedroom. This is something that is hard to overcome. We could ask any cocaine addict how hard it is to overcome that addiction and then imagine what it is like dealing with this addiction. When we have expectations and ideas being influenced by violent pornography, it is not difficult to imagine how this can contribute to abusive relationships or domestic violence. All of this is why I support Bill S-209 to restrict access to pornography for young people. We can take action and require age verification. We can help to prevent and reduce early exposure among the future generations. We can take a simple step to fight some of the worst impacts of online pornography. It is impossible for government to replace the role of parents, and it should never try to do that, but it is also true that parents are looking for help to protect their kids online, and the government knows that. It says as much when it promotes Bill C-34 to restrict access to social media. I find it interesting that we are debating both of these bills at the same time. Hopefully, it helps my colleagues on the government side understand where this bill is coming from and support this one as well. There are real concerns with young people using social media, which I share as a parent, but it is also likely that the negative effects of online pornography are even substantially worse, yet Bill C-34 would do nothing to address an issue of protecting the innocence of kids and youth from material that they should never see. Parenting has always been a tough job, but it has only gotten more complicated in a digital world. The least we can do for them is to pass Bill S-209.