The Italian Government has decided to protect children from online pornography and is working on how to achieve an effective computer blockade that prevents access to violent sexual content, after the latest cases of sexual abuse of minors at the hands of groups of the same age that have shocked the country.
“It is not about censoring, but about protecting children,” said the Minister for the Family, Eugenia Roccella, explaining a measure that has already been called for by various social exponents, from the Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi to the parish priest of Caivano (Naples), where two cousins ??aged 10 and 12 were raped by a “herd” of young people.
Experts today estimate the average age of children’s first contact with pornography at 7 years, which is increasingly violent and extreme, he explained.
The minister has made it clear in various statements to the media these days that for the Executive chaired by Giorgia Meloni it is “one of the main problems of the current educational crisis”, as “has tragically emerged in Caivano”.
“Families often experience a feeling of helplessness because this content travels through new technologies and children are infinitely better than us at handling them” so they should not be “left alone”, Roccella assured.
The measure focuses on effectively blocking the access of minors to porn websites, in most of which it is enough for the user to say that they are over 18 years of age to access: “It is evident that access cannot be prevented. access relying on self-certification of age, but objective instruments must be used”.
“We must hold websites responsible for age verification, but without entrusting them with user data. We will use third-party services to monitor the application of the law,” said the minister.
In this way, pornographic platforms “will have to depend, in exchange for remuneration, on ‘trusted third parties’, that is, specialized applications solely and exclusively for determining the age of users”, according to Guido Scorza, member of of the Personal Data Protection Authority, this Sunday in the newspaper Repubblica.
“Through documents, artificial intelligence or questionnaires, these applications can determine if the person who wants to access a porn video is of legal age or a minor, granting or not granting freedom without providing more data,” adds the expert.
Roccella has also highlighted other “tools, such as parental control, that are used very little and that need more publicity and diffusion”, so that “it is really used”.
“We make an effort to give our boys good food, good schools, a good education. On an affective and sexual level, what do we want them to learn at the age of formation? That the body is separate from the person, that consent Isn’t it necessary for women? The Government is not going to avoid this problem, which, moreover, is being raised in many parts of the world”, Roccella summarized.
The government’s proposal of the far-right Meloni has already received some criticism for being aimed at the sites of the pornographic industry on the web, but leaving out social networks and chat rooms, where a lot of porn material already circulates and where it could now be spread even more. , according to the specialists.
