The French Government is being urged to ban adverts for free pornography during the coronavirus pandemic.
Last month, Pornhub offered users in France, Italy and Spain one month’s free premium subscription to its content because of the lockdown.
The Protestant Evangelical Committee for Human Dignity and six other organisations signed a letter petitioning for “immediate measures and strong sanctions” to be enacted in order to “protect children against access to pornography on the internet and to fight against pedo-crimes”.
Damage
The organisations asked for pornographic websites to be “definitively closed in the short term” due to the dangers.
They added that investigations should be opened into such platforms’ involvement in the “uncontrolled dissemination of videos showing victims of trafficking, sexual abuse and minors”.
The letter was sent to President Emmanuel Macron and 25 other French political leaders.
Child abuse
Earlier this month, Police Scotland launched a campaign to combat an expected rise in child abuse, as more people view online pornography during lockdown.
#GetHelpOrGetCaught, the online campaign, aims to explain to porn users that online child abuse is no different from physical child abuse, and refers potential offenders to Stop It Now! Scotland.
Police Scotland’s Assistant Chief Constable Duncan Sloan warned: “Kids are holed up in their houses now, they are all using devices and that creates an opportunity for the abusers to reach out and attempt to connect with children in an attempt to groom them or abuse them, potentially in the real world”.
Stuart Allardyce, Director of Stop It Now! Scotland, said that most people “don’t suddenly wake up one day and decide they are going to abuse a child”, but there is “often a drift towards that behaviour where they have become bored and desensitised by legal online pornography and they are looking for more extreme material”.
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