Supreme Court Considers Most Important Online Child Protection Case in 20 Years
TRIGGER WARNING: The following content contains descriptions of sexual assault and may be upsetting to some readers.
Rachel was a sweet, innocent seven-year-old girl. Every night she would line her stuffed animals along her bed and say goodnight to each one of them, making sure none of them felt left out.
But at this tender age of seven, something happened that would change Rachel’s life forever. She was exposed to Internet pornography.
This led to thirteen years of pornography addiction, in which Rachel’s developing brain was polluted with scene after scene of abuse and degradation.
At the age of sixteen, Rachel was sexually assaulted. Reflecting back on this horrifying moment, Rachel says, “I remember making it home and running into my bedroom afterwards, looking at myself in the mirror and pulling my lip down, the inside of my mouth was purple with bruises. I was shaking and crying. And I thought to myself, ‘But this is just like porn, that experience was just like porn. I’m supposed to want and like this. I said no, but what does that really mean?’”
Pornography had taught Rachel that sexual violence was normal. So much so, that she stayed in a relationship with the perpetrator, and continued to be sexually assaulted and abused by him for two full years.
Now, Rachel has one message for the world: Pornography websites must be required to verify the age of their users. They must prevent children from accessing their content.
Read More
📣
ACTION: Ask Your State Legislators to Protect Children from Exposure to Online Pornography!
Take Action!
Senate Re-Introduces TAKE IT DOWN Act to Confront Sexual Abuse of Children
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) commended the re-introduction of the TAKE IT DOWN Act into the U.S. Senate today, saying that it’s a solution that’s desperately needed to offer a solution to children exploited by deepfake pornography (a.k.a. image-based sexual abuse).
“No child should be sexually abused by deepfake pornography that’s created of them. The TAKE IT DOWN Act mercilessly confronts this criminality by requiring tech platforms to remove this child sexual abuse material within 48 hours of receiving a removal request. Right now, it is a near impossible task for victims of image-based sexual abuse to have sexually abusive content removed from websites,” said Marcel van der Watt, President, National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
“Artificial intelligence has been used as a weapon against children, and increasingly so. We urgently call on the U.S. Senate to pass the TAKE IT DOWN Act – a solution like this for our children cannot wait,” van der Watt added.
The TAKE IT DOWN Act was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in the last legislative session.
Read More
📣
ACTION: Urge Congress to Reform CDA 230!
CDA 230 is the single greatest enabler of sexual exploitation in the digital age. It
must
be repealed or reformed.
Take Action!
NY Times Opinion:
Texas Has a Point About Online Pornography
When does freedom for adults become cruelty to children?
The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in a case,
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
, that raises exactly that question. The Free Speech Coalition (a pornography industry trade association) is challenging a 2023 Texas law that requires sites offering pornographic material to “use reasonable age verification methods” to check whether a user is at least 18.
According to the law
, “reasonable” methods can include providing “digital identification” to the site or complying with a commercial age verification system.
At first glance, the law is simple common sense.
As Texas noted
, all 50 states bar minors from purchasing pornography. Offline, identification requirements are common. Showing a driver’s license to enter a strip club is routine.
Zoning restrictions
can push pornographic establishments out of neighborhoods and away from schools and other places where kids congregate.
Online, though, it is the Wild West. Children have easy access to graphic and hard-core pornography. There’s a certain difficulty in writing about this issue — merely describing what children see online can be too much for adults reading family newspapers to tolerate.
Read More
VICTORY! Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Signs Braden's Law to Make Sextortion a Felony
Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation Wednesday named after
Braden Markus
that criminalizes sexual extortion, which occurs when someone blackmails another person over the release of private images.
Fifteen-year-old Braden Markus, like so many other teenagers, tragically took his own life after falling victim to sextortion. Braden was under the impression that he was texting with a teenage girl, but it was actually nefarious actors manipulating the teen in an attempt to scam him out of thousands of dollars.
Sextortion is an
extremely pervasive problem
faced by teens on social media. Predators pose as teens and chat with real teenagers, coercing them into sending sexual photos of themselves. These predators then threaten to release these photos unless the victim pays them exorbitant amounts of money. Tragically, this leaves the teen victims feeling so distressed that they often commit suicide.
"'We can't bring Braden back, but what we can do is something in his name today and say we’re going to make a difference,' DeWine said during a signing ceremony at the Ohio Statehouse, surrounded by Braden's family and friends."
Read More
Sincerely,
-----------------------------------------------------------
Email Marketing By CharityEngine ([link removed])
To be removed from this list, copy the following address into your web browser [link removed]
