We were pleased to contribute to the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act 2021 in June 2024. It was one of 10 submissions we made in a record breaking year in which we also achieved 34 victories!
In response to submissions, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland released and tabled the Report of the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act 2021 in parliament. Overall, we were pleased with the Report. We commend Report author, Delia Rickard, for her strong stance particularly regarding the harms of pornography, and related recommendations. We see these as a powerful acknowledgment of what's really going on in the digital world for women, and a leap in the right direction to protect women and children from the harms of pornography.
We were encouraged to see many of the themes we addressed and recommendations we made echoed in the Report. For example, the report
- recommended adopting a systemic duty of care to prevent online harm (Recommendation 4)
- said regarding sexual exploitation that interests of the child should be a primary consideration for online service providers in assessing mitigating the risks arising from the design and operation of their services (Recommendation 6)
- recommended that tech entities provide more detail in reporting including how they proactively moderated content, numbers of complaints and types of complaints received, how many user accounts were suspended/removed and why (Recommendation 10)
- acknowledged particularly that women with a public profile are subject to high rates of online abuse and harassment, and this has a chilling effect on women's participation in public life
- recommended an independent Ombuds scheme for the digital sector
- said that new Class 1 definitions and thresholds should clearly focus on illegal and seriously harmful material and directly correspond to the Criminal Code where appropriate. Sexually explicit material that includes violent and seriously injurious practices, such as choking, should sit under Class 1 (Recommendation 31)
- recommended "The maximum civil penalty that a court can impose should be increased to the greater of 5 per cent of global annual turnover or $50 million." This is a good recommendation in line with ours, that penalties should not be set amounts but rather should reflect the size of major platforms and the resources available to them.
- recommended increased civil penalties for non-compliance with removal notices (Recommendation 35)
- said that industry should bear the cost of regulation (Recommendation 64)
- proposed that Class 1 material is redefined to include:
- "depicts real sexual violence where AI generated material is indistinguishable from actual footage of an assault;
- depicts injurious sexual practices such as choking
We support this proposed approach. It's in line with what we have been saying, that a large amount of "mainstream" pornography actually belongs in Class 1.
Porn can have negative effects on understanding consent, expectations about sex, ideas about intimate relationships and gender stereotypes. While the priority must be to prevent children's access, including through continuing to designate pornography material Class 2, the normalization of these practices and this content should also be addressed, by stronger means than age restriction. To my mind such practices should be classified as Class 1. Much of this is gendered violence and our society needs to do more to prevent such practices becoming normalised and generally send a message that gendered violence won't be tolerated.
Delia Rickard, Report Author
Shortcomings
As things stand, the Act's potential for protecting women and children from the devastating harms of pornography rests heavily on the outcomes of the National Classification Scheme review. We can't even guess which way that will go.
The Report states that 'pornography can have positive effects' - a claim that we strongly oppose and for which there exists mountains of evidence to the contrary.
The Report recommended new Class 2 definitions and threshold include material that is legal but may be harmful, particularly for minors, and consensual sexually explicit material including non-injurious fetish material. (Recommendation 34) We strongly object to this recommendation, because we don't think fetish material should be treated as "regular" porn.
We disagree that bondage, spanking, fisting, urinating or dropping hot wax on women can be considered respectful and harmless, even if done with ‘consent.’ Other ‘legal’ categories like incest, age play and other paraphilias are harmful because they erode boundaries. They demean women’s desires for respect, consent, safety, and gentle affection, as explained by Caitlin Roper in a blog post on Etsy’s child abuse themed products. We find women acquiescing to abuse in their personal relationships for fear of being accused of “kink shaming.”
We have natural boundaries that protect us from harm. Pornography is routinely used to groom women and children for abuse by eroding their natural boundaries, beginning with our natural boundary to avoid watching other people have sex. There seems to be no end to the erosion of boundaries in pornography.
Nor are paraphilias harmless for the people experiencing them. They are more likely to engage in sexual risk-taking behaviours, while deviant sexual fantasy is a risk factor for sexual reoffending. Because paraphilias are connected with childhood traumas like abuse and neglect, it does not help to normalise this kind of pornography as ‘harmless and consensual’. Instead, resources should be dedicated to developing trauma-informed therapeutic options.
Read the full report here.
Click image below to read our Submission.
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