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.
“If these sites had age verification my life would look extremely different…” Rachel says. “I would not have endured the pain and struggle that I experienced. I should have never had the access that I did to porn, and I am telling you today that age verification is an utter most necessity to protecting children and preventing stories like mine.”
The Current Battle for Age Verification in the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case, FSC v Paxton, which examines the constitutionality of Texas’s age verification law. This law requires that websites with more than one-third of content that is pornography verify that users are at least 18 years old, before granting them access.
But the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the lobbying arm for the pornography industry, has challenged this law, arguing that shielding children from deeply harmful content is somehow a violation of the US Constitution and a “burden” on adults.
This is the most significant case to come before the Supreme Court on the issue of pornography in 20 years. The Court’s decision will lay the foundation, either for good or for ill, for protecting future generations from exposure to online pornography.
Here is the latest on this critical case.
Highlights from the Oral Arguments
On January 15th, the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments from both sides for FSC v Paxton.
The Supreme Court justices were shrewd in their questioning of FSC, rightly pointing out several difficulties in their logic. For example, they questioned why FSC argues for a different standard in the online and offline worlds. Justice Barret said, “Explain to me why the barrier is different online than in a brick-and-mortar setting… It seems like a lot of your concerns are driven by privacy concerns, which are really a feature of the Internet … You don’t have privacy if you go into the bookstore in Ginsberg or if you go to a movie theatre that displays pornographic movies. You have to show age verification.”
Justice Alito pointed out that privacy-protective age verification technology is already in use in many other online industries: “There are services that provide age verification for lots of things. And they are used for lots of purposes. For online gambling, for purchasing tobacco products, and they have very tough privacy limitations built into them.”
Several of the justices highlighted that technology has dramatically changed since the time of former cases that the FSC relied on to make their argument, and that this rapid evolution may call for a re-examination of precedents. The Chief Justice said, “Sable [a reference to Sable Communications v FCC, a 1989 Supreme Court case], of course, was 35 years ago. In that period, technological access to pornography obviously has exploded … And the nature of the pornography I think has also changed in those 35 years. Are those the sort of developments that suggest revisiting the standard of scrutiny is something that we should at least consider? As opposed to keeping a structure that was accepted and established in an entirely different era?”
Another highlight of the oral arguments was when the FSC’s lawyer, David Shaffer, conceded that likely 70% of pornography industry’s content would be deemed obscene material for minors, and that there is a compelling government interest in protecting children from this material.
Justice Alito: What percentage of your clients’ materials would be considered obscene for minors? … More than 50%?
Shaffer: I think that’s a fair guess.
Justice Alito: More than 70%?
Shaffer: Your honors I don’t want to go out on a limb, I think that may be correct but I can’t tell you with assurance.
Justice Alito: More than 90%?
Shaffer: There, your honor, I think we may be stretching upwards. As far as whether it’s sexually explicit.
Justice Alito: Okay. We got 70% though. Okay, alright. And then do you agree that there’s a compelling government interest in keeping obscene materials from minors?
Shaffer: Yes. Unequivocally.
Several justices also pushed back on the FSC’s glib insistence that parents enacting content filters solves the problem, and there is no need for age verification.
“Kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers. Let me just say that content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with. And I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn has shown that content filtering is not working.” ~Justice Barrett
“Mr. Shaffer, do you know a lot of parents who are more tech savvy than their 15-year-old children? … I mean Mr. Shaffer, come on, be real. There’s a huge volume of evidence that filtering doesn’t work. We’ve had many years of experience with it. We now have many, many states who have adopted age verification requirements … Why are they doing that if the filtering is so good?” ~Justice Alito
The truth is, age verification and content filters are both crucial parts of the solution to protect children online. Just like cars require seatbelts, airbags, and safety standards, the solution to protecting children online must be multi-faceted.
We look forward with hope to the decision of the Supreme Court in this crucial case. In advance of the hearing, NCOSE’s Law Center filed a brief representing 15 Texas State Senators, which outlined the profound harm that pornography causes to children.
Rally & Protest: The Will of the People is Made Clear!
On the day of and before the oral arguments, American citizens rallied together on the Supreme Court steps to show their support for age verification laws. The Court has heard the voice of the people—they want to protect kids!
NCOSE joined with allied organizations for a rally in front of the Supreme Court the morning of the oral arguments. Exodus Cry hosted a protest the day before.
We are deeply grateful to all who showed up to fight for children!
NCOSE Hosts Briefing in Advance of Oral Argument
The day before the court heard oral arguments, NCOSE hosted a briefing on the FSC v Paxton case. Legal experts, child protection advocates, researchers, and lived experience experts convened to discuss the legal aspects of the case, how children are harmed by pornography exposure, and why age verification is one of several necessary layers of online protections for children.

Iain Corby, Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA), addressed common myths about age verification technology, which are spread by its opponents.
He explains that current methods are not violative of privacy, as encryption can be employed to allow for “double blind age verification,” where there is no possible way to determine the individual’s identity. Further, the verification is done by a trusted third party, not an actual pornography site. For more information about how age verification doesn’t violate privacy, we encourage you to read the AVPA’s brief.
Corby also addressed the myth that age verification is too costly and “is going to bankrupt all those little porn sites.” The process of age verification costs about twelve cents per individual, and this cost is likely to continue dropping. There are methods which allow a user to only have to go through the age verification process one, rather than repeatedly at each use. A one-time fee of twelve cents per user is not going to bankrupt the pornography industry!
Meanwhile, Brad Littlejohn, Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, spoke to the argument that protecting children from pornography is solely the parents’ responsibility, and they need only enact content filters. “We don’t say, ‘Oh it’s just totally up to parents to keep their kids from drinking alcohol or playing with firearms,’” LittleJohn said. “We require retailers to enforce those age gates, to make the job of parenting at least manageable. And the way we do that is through age verification.”
Littlejohn also shared alarming research that whether or not a caregiver uses content filters only has a 0.5% effect on the likelihood of children encountering pornography. “We should have content filters, sure,” Littlejohn says. “But we should also add the layer of age verification to the equation, because content filters are not getting the job done.”
Other expert speakers at the briefing included Peter Gentala, Senior Legal Counsel, National Center on Sexual Exploitation; Donald Hilton, Neurosurgeon; Joseph Kohm III, Esq., Director of Public Policy, Family Policy Alliance; Christina Rangel, Director of Public Policy, Exodus Cry; Rachel Robison, Pornography Exposure Survivor; Terry Schilling, President, American Principles Project; Lisa Thompson, Vice President of Research, National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
Why We Must Protect Kids from Pornography
Online pornography is a powerful visual stimulus that is disruptive to children’s development. Research repeatedly shows that pornography consumption contributes to numerous harms, including:
- Sexual Violence: Longitudinal research shows that childhood exposure to violent pornography predicts a nearly six-fold increase in self-reported sexually aggressive behavior later in life. Further, a meta-analysis of 37 studies found that exposure to violent or rape pornography increased a child’s odds of experiencing sexual exploitation by nearly three times.
- Engaging in Prostitution: A cross-sectional survey of 15– 25 year-olds in the Netherlands found that both young women and men with greater pornography use were more likely to have ever bought or sold sex, even after controlling for a variety of factors such as sex, age, religion, education, and more.
- Mental Disorders and Risky Sexual Behavior: Use of hardcore pornography is linked to harmful outcomes such as mental health problems, child-on-child harmful sexual behaviors, risky sexual behaviors (e.g. condomless sex, early sexual debut, greater number of sexual partners, etc), physical and sexual victimization, and more.
- Poor Academic Achievement: A two-wave longitudinal study showed that increased use of internet pornography decreased adolescent boys’ academic performance 6 months later.
And so much more. To read about the plethora of research on how pornography harms children, see the brief NCOSE submitted on behalf of 15 Texas state senators and the brief of scholars Dr. Donald Hilton and Dr. Frederick Toates on pornography’s harms to the brain and evidence of behavioral addiction.