Exodus Cry is an organization that aims to "break the cycle of commercial sexual exploitation" by abolishing sex trafficking. For 10 years now, the Christian nonprofit has been advocating to lawmakers to implement legislation that criminalizes sex buyers, pimps, and traffickers and deliver freedom to victims. On September 7, the group launched a new massive campaign pushing for better ways to prevent kids from accessing porn.
The new campaign is called Protect Children Not Porn, and seeks to end child exposure to adult content by "calling for all sites hosting porn to require that users be age verified, with ID, before they can access content."
The online petition has garnered the support of over 44,000 individuals and is addressed to congressional committees, President Joe Biden and Big Tech executives. The campaign is also supported by up to a hundred anti-trafficking, women's rights and child protection organizations, a coalition of more than 2,000 organizations.
According to the Christian Post (CP), the massive campaign calls upon legislators to establish measures that require the establishment of adequate safeguards to protect children from accessing porn. Such measures include requiring websites that host pornographic content to require "their site visitors to verify their age with a government-issued ID, validated by a third-party platform." It also calls for all internet-accessing devices to have safety filters pre-installed before purchase.
"Children worldwide are a few clicks away from the most graphic and degrading sex acts imaginable," Exodus Cry founder and CEO Benjamin Nolot wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post. "It's a social crisis of behemoth proportions, but it isn't one without solution: requiring a credible age-verification mechanism on all sites hosting porn."
Nolot said that just this last decade, 9 out of 10 American boys were already encountering porn before they turned 19. He added that the average age of porn exposure is now 11. Researchers have also shown that children aged 10 and below account for up to 10% of traffic on porn sites. For sites like Pornhub, which had 42 billion visits in 2019, this meant that up to 4.2 billion visits were from children below fifth grade.
In a conversation with CP, Nolot shared a study that suggested how children and teens aged 10 to 15 are five times more likely to exhibit sexually aggressive behavior if violent porn is consumed. Another study showed that children who are addicted to hardcore porn are more likely to commit sexdual harrassment and rape.
"When kids watch porn, the wet concrete of their sexuality becomes formed around most often violent and aggressive sexual content," Nolot explained. "They associate these images with intense arousal and they are made to more likely act out in sexually aggressive manners and that in itself is alarming because they are awakened prematurely in their sexuality."
The massive campaign Protect Children Not Porn has amassed 44,000 of the 50,000 signatures it needs. The campaign is addressed to the U.S. Congress, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Subcommittee on Children & Families, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and Law, HHS Department Secretary Xavier Becerra, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
