Exposing children to pornography: How competing constructions of childhood shape state regulation of online pornographic material

Abstract

This article discusses policy debates in the United Kingdom and Australia concerning the regulation of online pornographic content as it relates to children. Through a thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders at the negotiation table, we find that rather than positivist notions of the ‘developing’ and ‘vulnerable’ child dominating policy discourse, post-modern representations of the ‘savvy’ and ‘agentic’ child have come to dominate policy culture and outcomes. In this scenario, the regulatory role of states in providing media protection is diminished, while neoliberal forms of governance that emphasise the responsibility of individuals, including parents and children, have come to dominate the emerging policy landscape.

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Exposing children to
pornography: How competing
constructions of childhood
shape state regulation of
online pornographic material
Caroline Keen
Alan France
Ronald Kramer
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Abstract
This article discusses policy debates in the United Kingdom and Australia concerning the
regulation of online pornographic content as it relates to children. Through a thematic
analysis of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders at the negotiation table, we find
that rather than positivist notions of the ‘developing’ and ‘vulnerable’ child dominating
policy discourse, post-modern representations of the ‘savvy’ and ‘agentic’ child have
come to dominate policy culture and outcomes. In this scenario, the regulatory role of
states in providing media protection is diminished, while neoliberal forms of governance
that emphasise the responsibility of individuals, including parents and children, have
come to dominate the emerging policy landscape.
Keywords
Childhood, Internet content regulation, Internet safety, neoliberalism, pornography
Introduction
Central to modernist notions of childhood has been the construction of children as ‘asex-
ual’ where ‘childhood innocence is premised on the notion that children are ignorant of
sex, and do not experience sexual feelings or desires’ (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014:
Corresponding author:
Caroline Keen, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, The University of Auckland, Human Sciences
Building, Level 9, 10 Symonds Street, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
Email: caroline.keen@live.com
872539NMS0010.1177/1461444819872539New Media & SocietyKeen et al.
research-article2019
Article

2 new media & society 00(0)
303). In this view, sexual knowledge is a key factor separating adulthood from child-
hood. Since the Purity movements across Anglo-Saxon nations during the late 19th cen-
tury, children’s innocence was managed by preventing their access to sexual media (Egan
and Hawkes, 2010). Media regulation to protect children (minors) from sexual content
became a widely accepted role for states particularly within English-speaking nations
(Lunt and Livingstone, 2012: xii). Despite this, efforts to negotiate such protections in
today’s global media and communications environment have been highly contentious
and difficult to realise.
More specifically, although regulations that prohibit child pornography, and prevent
children from accessing offline pornography still apply, what much of the research does
not address is that such measures have not been applied to Internet content. While illegal
and legitimate pornography are typically subject to regulation by states in other ways,
then, market actors who enable online content deemed unsuitable for minors have eluded
state regulation (McChesney, 2013: 105). However, the suggestion that states force
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to non-compliant Internet content con-
tinues to be met with resistance, and instead, a range of ‘softer’ regulatory practices have
emerged (Staksrud, 2013: 85) to address concerns about online pornographic content as
it relates to children.
Although debates about regulating online pornography typically assign greater value
to the rights of adults (to view and express what they want), this article addresses chil-
dren’s exposure to legal and illegal forms of pornography accessible on the Internet.
Children’s exposure to pornographic content has amplified since the mid-1990s with the
proliferation of sites that offer commercial or user generated content, and which make
such content accessible to minors through inadequate age verification systems. Given a
now ‘post-desktop media ecology’ (Mascheroni and Ólafsson, 2014: 13), the ways in
which children are now accessing sexual content have multiplied (Attwood et al., 2018:
3754; Byrne and Burton, 2017: 45; Livingstone et al., 2011). While not all children may
necessarily be ‘harmed’ by such exposure, there is growing recognition this may be neg-
atively shaping sexual expectations and practices among children and youth (Bridges,
2010; Flood, 2009), having especially negative consequences for some children
(Livingstone and Smith, 2014).
Researchers have also recognised that while children can be unknowing recipients of
sexualised content or communications, they may themselves take risks through access-
ing content and engaging in communication that may be harmful to themselves or others
(Staksrud, 2013: 55). While it is difficult to prove a causal link between viewing pornog-
raphy and sexualised behaviour (Nash et al., 2015), it is clear that in the digital environ-
ment, generating sexualised content is made easier, and the severity of harm that can
occur when self-generated sexual images are distributed without consent across peer
groups (Phippen, 2012) is potentially amplified given that such information is now scal-
able, persistent, easily replicated and searched (boyd, 2010).
Methodology
In this research, we are interested in conceptions of childhood and how they shape
contemporary policy landscapes. Thus, competing constructions of childhood are

Keen et al. 3
considered as different regimes of truth (Foucault, 1977). Interviewee claims often entail
conceptions of childhood that legitimise particular policy positions. Claims that ‘chil-
dren can navigate the Internet’, for instance, essentially argue that regulation is unneces-
sary, while claims that ‘children are vulnerable’ intimate that the state should regulate. In
other words, there is competition over the category of ‘childhood’. This research argues
that the notion of children as ‘vulnerable’, which was hegemonic in Australia (Robinson,
2013: 6) and the United Kingdom (Oswell, 1998: 278) during the 1980s, has been
replaced by the child as ‘agentic’, ‘self-determining’ and ‘risk-taking’ within policy cir-
cles, and that the latter construction of childhood is sanctioned by the most powerful
Internet players. We argue that this shift in conceptions of the child is consistent with
neoliberal forms of governance. Our understanding of neoliberalism derives from the
work of Wacquant (2010), who posits that neoliberal governance inspires a range of
punitive policies that, rather than regulating private actors, are aimed at increasing the
responsibilities of individuals. In the context of Internet pornography, regulation is
directed towards parents and children, thereby tasking them with the management of
online media risks.
This research project examined two case studies, Australia and the United Kingdom,
both of which had very public debates about regulating Internet content. This provided
the opportunity to examine constructions of childhood within policy circles in two dis-
tinct socio-political contexts. From an examination of media and policy documents, we
identified six high-level ‘elite’ executives who were influential in the Australian and UK
debates. We phoned these prospective participants to request an interview and then fol-
lowed this up by email providing project information and consent forms. We adopted a
purposive sampling approach by following participant’s recommendations (Patton,1990)
to interview an additional 14 executives with relevant experience and expertise within
these policy landscapes (Bogner et al., 2009). All participants approached consented to
an interview.
Qualitative interviews were conducted with 20 informants between 2011 and 2015
which explored the issues they felt were most relevant to their organisation with respect
to content regulation and children. Participants included 15 men and 5 women who were
CEOs, senior executives and business owners across Internet industry associations, law
enforcement, non-governmental organisation (NGOs), cybersafety educators, technol-
ogy vendors, political, public research and crown entities, as well as Internet service,
content and search providers. While men dominated the Internet industry, women were
well-represented across the remaining organisations. The interviews generated over 700
pages of text and a thematic analysis was then conducted (Braun and Clarke, 2006;
Strauss and Corbin, 1998) using NVivo software to code and to identify key themes
across the various stakeholders. There is a relatively small proportion of people that can
be interviewed in this field. By interviewing CEOs and senior executives who were
experts, and veteran commentators on Internet regulation, we had direct access to organi-
sational policy cultures and positions. This yielded rich qualitative material from which
the basic contours of broader policy cultures could be inferred (Bogner et al., 2009).
Given this, the recurrent themes that emerged are unlikely to be unusual or isolated; they
recur across multiple interviews with repetition approaching a point of saturation.

4 new media & society 00(0)
A range of representations emerged from the thematic analysis in relation to children,
the Internet and pornography which, by drawing on Becker’s (1963) labelling theory, could
be arranged into moral and economic groupings (see Figure 1). First, protectionist dis-
courses emerged which favoured stronger state regulation. These included representations
that reflected concern based on being a parent or a person who had turned their concern into
a business enterprise, but whose beliefs and understandings were united by adopting a
moral position. Such representations were made by players who can be best thought of as
‘moral entrepreneurs’ in Becker’s (1963) sense because they believe there to be something
wrong with the moral fabric of society, and therefore pursue a moral agenda. These indi-
viduals typically worked in policing, child safety education and child protection industries.
As ‘rule creators’ or ‘rule enforcers’ (Becker, 1963), they frequently focused on the lack of,
or infringement of, rules to protect children in the new Internet environment.
Also emerging from the thematic analysis were representations that prioritised corpo-
rate interests. These representations were made by individuals in the business sector but
who act primarily in the interests of profit. This category can be thought of as ‘corporate
players’ and typically included organisations within the Internet service, content and
search industries.
This is not to say that corporate players do not show any consideration to moral
dimensions or that a moral entrepreneur cannot have an economic objective. For instance,
although some moral entrepreneurs may end up being tethered to commercial or eco-
nomic interests, what they do is primarily a moral mission for them, one driven by anxi-
eties surrounding sexual activities that fall beyond socio-cultural norms. Such actors
overwhelmingly pursue their agenda through moralistic rhetoric. These moral crusaders
may try to transform and exploit their moral programme for economic gain, even draw-
ing support from organisations whose motives are driven by profit (Becker, 1963: 149),
but they are distinct from larger actors such as an ISP whose economic objective is in the
millions (if not billions) of dollars. Figure 1 shows how actors may fall into different
positions in relation to their moral and economic interests.
Essentially, these categories represent different regimes of truth in which individuals
could reasonably be positioned. However, individuals could at times generate conflicting
discourses drawn from their personal and rich work histories across different industry
sectors.
This article examines ‘moral entrepreneur’ and then ‘corporate player’ constructions
of childhood in relation to pornography and the Internet. The article then concludes with
a discussion of the key issues this raises for policymakers.
Figure 1. Moral entrepreneur and corporate player dimensions.
Moral Entrepreneurs Corporate Players
Moral dimension Extensive public outreach
Moral crusaders
Rule creators and rule enforcers
Some public engagement in
order that they maintain a
dialogue with State officials
Economic Dimension Small scale opportunities Primary concern with securing
massive profit/revenue.

Keen et al. 5
Defending modernity’s child: the moral entrepreneur
The moral entrepreneur grouping included not only people who worked for the police,
safety educators and child protection agencies, but also those who had turned their con-
cern into a business enterprise. What unites these individuals is a shared, moral under-
standing of children and media risks. Several claims emerged that could be grouped
under the category of moral entrepreneur: that children are necessarily ‘vulnerable’ and
‘at risk’; that ‘childhood’ should be a period of innocence and sexual ignorance; that
pornography was clearly damaging to children; strict parental supervision was not uni-
versally possible; and finally, that industry self-regulation is insufficient to protect
children.
These constructions of childhood adhered to familiar modernist notions of the child
as both ‘vulnerable’ and ‘innocent’ (Egan and Hawkes, 2010). The child was therefore ‘at
risk’ by virtue of not yet reaching adulthood, invoking common sense and protectionist
discourses that beckoned stronger government regulation:
Most everybody wants to protect children, most people recognize that children are vulnerable.
(Interview with spokesperson for an NGO, 2011)
[There] is often a focus on kids because they are vulnerable, they are the primary vulnerable
population online . . . as a society we have to try and protect the vulnerable. (Interview with a
cybersafety educator, 2014)
Resembling positivist-scientific developmental theory (Piaget, 1964), moral entrepre-
neurs believed children lacked the ‘cognitive ability to protect themselves’ (Interview
with a cybersafety educator, 2014) and did not consider children as being psychologi-
cally mature enough to act responsibly or safely when online.
While these actors acknowledged the social and educational opportunities the Internet
offered children, their unsupervised Internet access was highly problematic. They con-
ceived the developing child as lacking the maturity and reasoning power of adults to
identify online risks. This ‘cognitive deficit’ made them vulnerable and exposed them to
damaging consequences. For instance, one cybersafety educator stated that
Children cannot foresee risk, perceive risk, or understand consequences. They are not thinking
before they are doing [. . .] they are not acting with criminal intent. They are not acting in any
other way than they are a silly child. (Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Children’s status as ‘youthful experts’ or ‘digital natives’ when combined with an
assumed lack of reasoning power was thought to place them at greater risk than previous
generations.
Moral entrepreneurs adhered to positivist notions of childhood as progressing through
a series of life stages rigidly defined by age that determines children’s cognitive and
physical development to be insufficient to enable them to act independently of adult
supervision. Adhering to these developmental ideals tended to perpetuate the notion of
children as vulnerable and dependent on others for their care, and invoked protectionist

6 new media & society 00(0)
discourses that can, when taken to the extreme, work against children’s rights to digital
participation (Livingstone et al., 2015).
Pornography and the sexualisation of childhood
Such positivist perceptions of childhood conceptualise the child as on the path to adult-
hood. These developmental ideals were especially apparent when talking about chil-
dren’s exposure to ‘adult’ sexual knowledge. Moral entrepreneurs were concerned that
children today had greater sexual awareness due to a highly sexualised aesthetic now
pervasive within mainstream media, a situation they felt put them at greater risk of
exploitation and corruption. They believed that children’s sexual interest should ideally
be discouraged and their knowledge of sex carefully managed in accordance with their
developmental age:
If it is age and developmentally appropriate, it will work, but if it is ‘we need to understand that
children are sexual beings and they should be able to do their own thing’, that’s like saying
children are sensible beings and they should be able to [. . .] wander aimlessly around the city
at two in the morning. (Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Resembling the late 19th century scientific discourses that held childhood to be
devoid of sexuality (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014), these framings disavowed chil-
dren from expressing any sexual agency. Sex education would only be useful if it inocu-
lated children against the influences of pornography:
For every child that sits there and understands their own sexuality and goes on to make good
healthy decisions there are 50 that don’t. [. . .] children are not capable of making these
decisions and as an adult we need to make them on their behalf, not in a draconian way but in
a protective way. (Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Drawing on their personal and work-related observations, these moral entrepreneurs
claimed that primary-aged school children were now sexually active, a situation they
attributed to Internet technologies, and which constituted an urgent threat to childhood.
One cybersafety educator asserted,
The things that I dealt with sexually involving children! [Things] I used to see 15 or 17 year
olds involved in, I [now] see 11 or 12 year olds involved in. So I’ve seen a massive shift in ages.
I am regularly called into primary schools to deal with children who are sharing naked photos.
(Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Moral entrepreneurs described ‘Internet pornography’1 as depicting explicit and devi-
ant sexual representations that transgressed acceptable norms of sex as adult, monoga-
mous, heterosexual, respectable and private (Mulholland, 2015: 322). They claimed that
‘Internet pornography’ was more deviant and violent, and that exposure to it constituted
a more serious and widespread threat to children and society than in past generations.
These actors claimed that the Internet enabled children to view sexual content that could

Keen et al. 7
not be considered mainstream (for adults) and was therefore more dangerous to chil-
dren’s sexual development. They claimed children were actually watching:
. . . bestiality, violent pornography, we are not just talking about a picture of a penis or boobs,
we are talking about three on one sex, all kinds of stuff that kids as young as 11 have been
witness to. (Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2015)
The problem is they are not watching what you would remotely call ‘normal’[ . . .] they are
watching rape, torture, bondage and violence, and of course the girl never says no, never says
ouch that hurts, never says stop, always appears to like it and want more. So it’s a skewed view
of normality and it’s bothering. (Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Rather than being supported by evidence-based research, such claims were largely
anecdotal in nature. However, a former researcher for the public think tank, The Australia
Institute, claimed that in the context of the Internet there are now,
. . . more callous representations of pornography, an increase in choking, gagging, and slapping
and verbally aggressive language, shifts in the kinds of practices that are in pornography, such
as anal intercourse, and triple penetration, are much more routine in pornography. (Interview
with a former Australia Institute researcher, 2015)
Also that children’s consumption of Internet pornography would negatively affect
their views of sex by
. . . shaping young men’s expectations around deep fellatio, around extra vaginal ejaculation,
choking and other kinds of practices that are routine in porn [and that the evidence was that]
young girls don’t want to and are pressured into it. (Interview with a former Australia Institute
researcher, 2015)
Moral entrepreneurs feared Internet pornography would normalise violence and por-
nographic practices among children and teenagers as, ‘once it is out there it becomes
mainstream and it becomes the “norm” if you like, and kids are accessing it’ (Interview
with a cybersafety educator, 2014).
They regularly associated children’s exposure to Internet pornography with increas-
ing negative sexual agency, and a perceived increase in child sex offending, again having
ramifications for broader society. Within such framings, sexual agency was seen as inap-
propriate among children. Sexting was particularly problematic since it rendered chil-
dren’s sexuality visible. For girls, the risks of sexting were considered much greater
because once ‘it’s out there – it’s permanent’ (Interview with a cybersafety educator,
2014) presumably placing girls in a position of disrepute from which it is difficult to
recover.
Boys and young men were also considered to be at risk of Internet pornography, but
for different reasons. The Australia Institute research had claimed that boys would
develop unrealistic sexual expectations and that regular access to violent and extreme
pornography increased the risk of boys sexually offending (Flood and Hamilton, 2003).
Moral entrepreneurs believed that there was a correlation between the consumption of

8 new media & society 00(0)
pornography and illegitimate sexual activity by boys. As one cybersafety educator
asserted, there are
. . . a large number of young people exhibiting behaviours that are not linked to age and
developmental stage [so] that child-on-child sexual offending is increasing. (Interview with a
cybersafety educator, 2014)
In such readings, children are constructed as ‘passive media consumers’ (James and
Prout, 1997) who lack the critical skills to reject violence in pornography on ethical or
moral grounds. However, despite a lack of evidence to support a causal link between
viewing pornography and sexual offending (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014;
Livingstone, 2017), some researchers claim that pornography can be a factor in youth
sexual assault (McKibbin et al., 2016).
Parental responsibility in the online space
In the absence of Internet media regulation, moral entrepreneurs generally recommended
controlling children’s access to the Internet via technological intervention and parental
mediation. However, the notion that children’s safety could be entrusted to parents
proved problematic among moral entrepreneurs, who frequently described parents as
naïve about Internet media risks, and indifferent or ignorant of their children’s activities
online:
I don’t know if there is a full understanding by some parents of exactly what their kids can do
online [. . .] I talk to some of my peers and they are a bit naïve about exactly what kids can do
online these days. (Interview with spokesperson for Australian Federal Police, 2014)
They were concerned that some parents lacked knowledge of the online risks (such as
pornography and sexual exploitation) and the technical knowledge to set up protections
on a growing number of Internet-connected devices and platforms:
Some parents I have spoken to are [. . .] so inexperienced that they haven’t got any idea of how
to open a program up, let alone use a web browser. I have actually had parents come to me who
don’t know that an iPad is connected to the internet. They don’t know what it is, they don’t
know how to delete programs and they are completely helpless because they have got these
young kids looking at porn, or downloading dangerous apps [. . .] and the parents have got no
awareness of what’s happening. (Interview with a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Research is inconclusive. For example, family use of filtering products and services
varies between different political and cultural contexts, with a quarter of European par-
ents (Przybylski and Nash, 2018), while almost half of Australian parents claiming to use
them (Third et al., 2014: 15). The claim that not all parents possess the IT knowledge to
understand the risks is more credible given the expanding array of Internet devices and
platforms that children use (Byrne and Burton, 2017: 45). In Australia, ‘91% of parents
claim they are aware of their children’s mobile phone and online usage’, while teenagers

Keen et al. 9
‘overwhelmingly claim that this is not the case’ (Third et al., 2014: 5). Such findings may
go some way towards accounting for moral entrepreneur’s concerns that many parents
are not fully aware of their children’s online activities.
Moral entrepreneurs asserted that many parents struggled to restrict children from
age-inappropriate online activities believing their children would suffer from social
exclusion, or that parents simply gave in to their children’s demands. For instance, one
cybersafety expert claimed that parents placed children at unnecessary risk by not enforc-
ing rules online:
[. . .] then you get the kids that get into trouble online on sites that they shouldn’t be on and the
parent wants to blame the site, but if she was not there doing the wrong thing [she] would not
be front page news. It’s as simple as that! We have got to prevent children from becoming
victims online and one of the ways of doing that is keeping them off the sites. (Interview with
a cybersafety educator, 2014)
Moral entrepreneurs problematised children’s autonomous use of the Internet, reject-
ing the idea that children were mature enough to manage online risks. However, a grow-
ing rights discourse emerging from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child (UNCRC; United Nations, 1989) means that children have increasing power to
negotiate their Internet access. Wide variation in parents’ awareness, an enduring genera-
tion gap (Byrne and Burton, 2017) and a growing rights discourse work against families
implementing more disciplinary and restrictive parenting strategies.
Failure of industry self-regulation
Overall, moral entrepreneurs were cynical of corporate players, seeing Internet service
and content industries as failing to protect children from harmful content and unsolicited
communications by sexual predators. They cited multiple ways in which the market
placed children at greater risk of unsolicited exposure to pornography. One cybersafety
educator claimed that new apps were being developed and marketed through the Apple
store which exposed children to direct contact by paedophiles, and that Apps like ‘Kik
Messenger’ and ‘Instagram’ were very dangerous products as they had very poor privacy
settings, leaving children exposed to sexual predators and unsolicited pornographic
images:
[O]nce kids start playing on [Kik Messenger apps] . . . their profile names go up on all sorts of
websites [. . .] so if you want to connect with a girl who is between 13 and 15 years old you can
[. . .] kids are advertising their Kik Messenger profiles on Instagram and not realising that it is
being broadcast publically, so that is how complete strangers find kids. (Interview with a
cybersafety educator, 2015)
Concerns with the lack of industry self-regulation may have some validity, since
research highlights the increasingly complex ways in which children are now more likely
to encounter pornography through a range of Internet-enabled devices and applications
(Byrne and Burton, 2017: 45).

10 new media & society 00(0)
Claiming the agentic, post-modern child: the corporate
player
Falling under the category of corporate players were elite executives from Internet ser-
vice and search providers, and content and Internet industry associations, for whom
profit was the primary driver of their activities. Several key themes emerged that could
be grouped under the category of corporate players: children were constructed as active
social agents who were sexual and self-determining; pornography was perceived as
‘okay’, ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ (predominantly for boys); risk was normalised in rela-
tion to children and teenagers; parents and children were assigned responsibility for
managing Internet risks; and finally, restricting adolescent Internet use was regarded as
unnecessary.
Children as agentic and ‘savvy’ social actors online
Individuals within the corporate player group tended to promote the view that children
were best understood as ‘active social actors’, resembling a post-modern discourse that
emerged from the new sociology of childhood during the 1980s (James and Prout, 1997).
They tended to view children as able to be self-policing and self-governing when online,
in effect extending to children the notion of liberal individualism traditionally reserved
for adults.
In contrast to moral entrepreneurs, corporate players conceptualised children’s rela-
tionship to pornography and the Internet in noticeably different ways. Drawing on the
well-known notion of children as ‘digital natives’ to highlight the positive attributes of
the digital generation (Prensky, 2001), corporate players assuaged moral entrepreneur’s
constructions of the child as vulnerable. They described children as active and savvy
social actors in the online space. A representative of the adult industry downplayed
online risks by claiming children to have advanced media literacies and digital skills giv-
ing them the advanced resilience to cope online:
. . . children are incredibly media savvy, and they understand stuff, and [. . .] they can see [and]
they can understand shit on the net far better than we can. [They] know when someone is
yanking their chain online much more easily than we do [. . .] I also think kids are actually a lot
more resilient and a lot more discerning than we give them credit for. (Interview a representative
of Australian pornography industry, 2011)
This notion of the ‘digital native’ has been challenged by research that claims children
are more at risk the longer they are online (Livingstone and Smith, 2014: 642), and that the
majority of children (80%) do not have advanced skills as implied by their ‘digital native’
status (Byrne et al., 2016). This would seem to suggest that the majority of children are ‘not
so savvy’ and lack the critical literacies needed to safely navigate Internet content.
Meanings of pornography
Whereas moral entrepreneurs saw Internet pornography as deviant, corporate players
suggested it was better understood as ‘mainstream’. An adult industry spokesperson

Keen et al. 11
emphasised that the majority of people looking at online pornography were watching
mainstream, pleasurable and ‘legitimate’ content. Claims to the contrary were refuted:
Gail Dines and Abigail Bray saying that it is ‘anal pounding, violent, degrading content’ [. . .]
this is actually not what people are looking at. What people are looking at is young women or
young couples doing stuff and pretty much looking like they enjoy it. They are not crying,
gagging, vomiting, you know. (Interview with an Australian pornography industry spokesperson,
2011)
The notion that pornography was harming children and young persons was under-
mined by framing such concerns as consistent with a ‘moral panic’:
[T]hey make claims like ‘our children are being drowned in porn, and boys are behaving badly
now because they have seen porn’ and you know ‘they don’t know how to have a relationship
with a real woman’ and all of this kind of hysteria. (Interview with an Australian pornography
industry spokesperson, 2011)
Unlike moral entrepreneurs, corporate players asserted that children and adolescents
were largely self-governing and resilient when it came to pornographic media. They
constructed children as sexual beings who were naturally curious about sex. Notably,
they also obfuscated the issue of age by referring to children as ‘kids’, ‘young people’ or
‘people in the 20s’ which had the effect of challenging whether developmental ideals
could be strictly applied in the liminal zone of adolescence.
In addition to construing pornography as non-problematic, corporate players often
asserted that the consumption of pornography was a natural and inevitable part of boys
healthy sexual development, often constructing this as a legitimate ‘rite of passage’ to
adulthood. For instance, an Internet industry representative offered the following:
I am sure that this is true of most males you know, the idea of Playboy magazines is really . . .
I’ll probably get into hot water here . . . you would think that adolescents have a natural
curiosity around sex and that is not necessarily an unhealthy thing, it is part of their development,
and if you can’t access that in socially permitted ways you will do it through subterfuge. Now
they use the internet, the phenomenon is actually the same phenomena. (Interview with a
representative of the Australian ISP industry, 2012)
Although acknowledging that such sentiments might land him in ‘hot water’, this
industry representative did not agree with moral entrepreneur claims that Internet por-
nography was especially perverse or dangerous to children. It may be worth emphasising
that any talk of young girls, and whether pornography is also a ‘part of their develop-
ment’, is absent. However, research has suggested that, relative to girls, it is boys who
generally view pornography, and that initial exposure to pornography is often an act initi-
ated by boys, and not necessarily welcomed by girls (Nash et al., 2015: 8). By taking
boys as the benchmark, however, children’s consumption of Internet pornography was
framed as innocuous.
Where moral entrepreneurs believed children to be vulnerable to violent imagery,
corporate players disagreed that pornography was necessarily damaging to children,

12 new media & society 00(0)
claiming there was no evidence to suggest that ‘children exposed to pornography sim-
plicitas go on to become sex offenders or form certain views that are antisocial’ (Interview
with a representative of the Australian ISP industry, 2012).
By minimising the possible dangers of pornography, and emphasising children’s resil-
ience, corporate players constructed children as self-determining and capable of manag-
ing media risks. This approach complemented their overall policy position that argued
for individual Internet user self-regulation rather than market regulation, a policy that
clearly extended to children.
Responsibilising parents and children
Despite having constructed children as competent social actors who could navigate adult
media online, corporate players paradoxically drew on modernist notions of the ‘danger-
ous child’ (Oswell, 1998) by highlighting their capacity to harm others in the online
environment. Corporate players, therefore, endorsed the ‘family’ as a key site of moral
regulation:
If it’s a moral judgment we are not going to get into that. (Interview with a UK ISP spokesperson,
2012)
It is the role of the parents and education systems to inculcate values. (Interview with a
spokesperson for the Australian ISP industry, 2012)
This reinforced the notion of the family as the key site of regulation, effectively draw-
ing on the positivist adult–child dichotomy preferred by moral entrepreneurs (James and
Prout, 1997). This approach allowed corporate players in the ISP industry to reject indus-
try regulation by placing responsibility for online risks within the family. Consequently,
they promoted parental ‘empowerment’ practices:
It’s not for me to say how many of our customers should be using parental controls. It’s entirely
down to them to decide how they want to protect their children. If it is putting the PC in the
same room, if it is making sure that their children do not have a mobile phone that has access
to the internet, if it is having parental conversations with older children and saying this is what
is out there and welcome to the real world, this is how you deal with it, you know all those
things are valid. We are not going to tell parents how to parent. (Interview with an UK ISP
spokesperson, 2012)
Despite placing responsibility for children’s safety with the family, they did not fully
agree with contemporary Internet safety discourses that focused on restricting children’s
time online. They considered these cautionary and preventive practices to be out-of-sync
with today’s social trends among youth and new technologies that provide many new
opportunities for social interaction. For instance, one ISP stated that
Governments, NGOs and others that are preparing, positioning cybersafety messaging,
regulations, and legislation around this issue are trying to apply our risk appetite and

Keen et al. 13
understanding of what is going on today to future laws. I don’t reckon it is right. (Interview with
an Australian ISP spokesperson, 2011)
Ultimately, Australian and UK ISPs were reticent about regulatory practices and
discourses that aimed to discourage families and children from using the Internet as
this conflicted with corporate objectives where the priority was to ‘sell access’.
Thus, while supporting the idea that individuals, families and children should know
of and manage online risks, they did not wish to encourage interventionist and
restrictive policies that limit children’s Internet use, which would ultimately affect
their bottom line.
Normalising Internet risk and children’s ‘risky’ decision-making
While acknowledging that the Internet intensified media risks to children, corporate
players did not feel children warranted special treatment, alleging that all Internet users
were vulnerable to a wide range of risks generated by online technologies:
All users regardless of age are at risk [from threats such as] cyber bullying, sexting, phishing,
and fraudulent identity theft, online crime, other different crime types that are facilitated
through technology. These are all significant risks impacting the experience of the user. [. . .]
so I don’t try to say that the most vulnerable members of the society at risk are children who are
online. (Interview with an Australian ISP spokesperson, 2011)
Defined as a normal consequence of technological innovation in the risk society
(Beck, 1992), risk was distributed across all Internet users, minimising any special treat-
ment of children and placing responsibility for knowing and managing these risks with
all Internet users, including parents and children:
So we actually say [. . .] ‘all users regardless of age are at risk because of their lack of
understanding and knowledge of some of the risks that exist’. People should be more aware of
how it [the internet] works so they can get better value from it, and once they actually understand
how it works they are better informed about the risks. (Interview with an Australian ISP
spokesperson, 2011)
Sexualised conduct in the distinctly public arena of online social life rendered obso-
lete those 19th century framings of children as necessarily asexual, vulnerable and pas-
sive. Instead, a distinctly post-modern construction of childhood was evoked. Children
were perceived as ‘willing to take more risk’ as there had been ‘a drifting or a normaliza-
tion of risk, generation to generation, because of technology’ (Interview with an
Australian ISP spokesperson, 2011). Corporate players believed that public anxiety
would be resolved as the new generation of ‘digital parents’ would be less concerned
about children viewing pornography or sharing sexual self-portraits online (Interviews
with spokespersons for a corporate ISP and the pornography industry, 2011). Overall,
corporate players generalised risk as a normal consequence of technological innovation
to which children were quick to adapt.

14 new media & society 00(0)
Concluding comments
These findings show that corporate player’s constructions of childhood disrupt positivist,
developmental understandings of childhood and have persuasive value in the policymak-
ing arena. Moral entrepreneur framings offered rigid definitions of what childhood
‘ought to be’ based on biological developmental theories, while corporate player accounts
veered towards post-modern conceptions of childhood by accentuating the liminal zone
of adolescence (Valentine, 2003).
Corporate player’s constructions of children mirror social actor theory popular with
the new sociology of childhood (James and Prout, 1997). Whereas childhood studies
sought to counteract ‘pre-sociological’ concepts of children as passive dependents
(Tisdall and Punch, 2012), corporate actor constructions describe children and teenagers
as competent, resilient and self-determining in the online environment, thereby assuming
agency to be inherently positive and sought by all children and teenagers (Tisdall and
Punch, 2012: 256). Corporate players downplayed moral entrepreneur’s concerns that
digital technologies put children at risk, claiming instead that risky behaviour had
become normalised. However, children’s relationship to risk is far from universal and
risky decision-making far from normalised (Livingstone and Smith, 2014).
Equally problematic are positivist approaches that use developmental guidelines as
indicators of potential harm. European research now suggests that children’s confidence,
digital literacies and exposure to risk is more closely tied to factors such as political and
cultural contexts, socio-economic status, gender and parenting strategies, presenting
ongoing challenges to policymakers (Livingstone et al., 2011; Tsaliki et al., 2014). This
is particularly problematic when relying on the family as a site of regulation and disci-
pline. Parents today are increasingly expected to supervise children’s media activities,
but have less ‘moral right to impose rules and sanctions without democratic consultation’
(Livingstone, 2009: 7) and are therefore less likely to use traditional disciplinary parent-
ing methods, as expressed by moral entrepreneurs in this research. Increasingly mobile
and private access afforded through an expanding array of devices, apps and platforms,
requires that parents attain higher levels of digital literacy if they are to effectively ‘foster
intergenerational conversations about technology use’ (Third et al., 2014: 5). Parental
mediation and the use of filtering technologies have been consistently advocated by gov-
ernment and quasi-government entities in both the United Kingdom and Australia
(Ofcom, 2014; Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner, 2016). While effects
research may support the heavy mediation of children’s Internet use (Owens et al., 2012;
Peter and Valkenburg, 2009), other research has countered that pornography may con-
tribute positively to youth (Bale, 2011) through ‘developing identities, relationship, peer
groups, communities and other personal connections’ (Attwood et al., 2018: 3756).
Furthermore, ‘general restriction, place restriction or monitoring strategies’ could result
in young people being less active and resilient in the online space (Przybylski et al.,
2014).
This research also found that meanings of pornography were ambiguous, especially in
regard to children’s exposure to it. For instance, corporate players conceptualised Internet
pornography as mainstream, legitimate and pleasurable, while moral entrepreneurs con-
ceptualised it as violent, derogatory to women, transgressing adult social norms, and

Keen et al. 15
therefore problematic for children. To be sure, relatively little is known about what chil-
dren are viewing due to the ethical difficulties of research involving children (Livingstone
and Smith, 2014: 639; Nash et al., 2015: 4). Since most surveys are reliant on children’s
self-reporting, making it likely that they are not fully declaring their viewing habits, it is
difficult to gauge the nature of pornographic content that children are exposed to (Nash
et al., 2015: 4). The ethical limitations of interviewing minors mean that we do not know
with any accuracy if they are viewing ‘less explicit images of nudity or sex’, ‘graphic
non-simulated sex, or even illegal extreme pornography’ (Nash et al., 2015: 7).
In addition, while moral entrepreneur’s concerns about boys’ vulnerability to pornog-
raphy are largely anecdotal, research from the EU Kids Online project suggests that boys
face greater risks due to a predilection to seek out violent pornography (Hasebrink et al.,
2009). Empirical evidence could in the future be generated through technological verifi-
cation of children’s access to sexual materials (Przybylski and Nash, 2018). What we do
know is that children are going online at much younger ages (Byrne and Burton, 2017;
Nash et al., 2015). The paucity of empirical evidence as to what children and adolescents
are actually being exposed to not only risks amplifying moral panic around children’s
sexualisation, but such moral framings also perpetuate ambiguity around what consti-
tutes harmful pornography in relation to children and adolescents (Attwood et al., 2018).
On a final note, given the ambiguities around children’s agency with respect to por-
nography and Internet use, existing neoliberal individualising policies that favour the
interests of corporate players may be too optimistic, if not naive. This is especially so
when we consider that rapid technological innovation is changing how children ‘see’
content. While some larger ISPs in the United Kingdom and Australia now provide
‘whole home’ pornography filtering services to residential connections, and the UK
Digital Economy Act (2017) introduces stronger age verification rules for pornography
websites, the ways in which children are exposed to pornographic material have expanded
beyond commercial websites to include, for instance, ‘photo or video-sharing platforms,
search engines, adverts, interpersonal messaging apps and services, SNSs, P2P portal
sites, torrent services, mobile and tablet apps, games, sharing devices, and the dark web’
(Nash et al., 2015: 10). Industry self- or co-regulation is not unusual with large corporate
companies whom have a vested interest in being perceived as a good corporate citizen,
but this can be far more difficult to achieve ‘where actors have no interest in complying
with social or ethical norms’ (Nash et al., 2015: 24). Given the multiplicity of players
now involved in providing these technologies, seeking industry self-regulation without
considerable regulatory oversight may well be unachievable. Overall, these policy land-
scapes continue to be heavily indebted to corporate narratives around individual respon-
sibility, with industry regulation typically occurring when there is some material benefit
to the corporation.2
It is clear that within the media policy landscape, social actor and developmental
understandings of childhood produce conflicting policy positions. These findings sug-
gest that although child–adult dualisms are still active in policy debates, the voices of
corporate players promoting the agentic and resilient child undermine distinctions
between childhood and adulthood and, more particularly, support neoliberal/individual-
ising policies by exploiting the ambiguity of agency in adolescence. Such policies do

16 new media & society 00(0)
little to address online content that, if it were to appear in ‘traditional’ media formats,
would be subject to state regulation.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the individuals who agreed to participate in this study.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Caroline Keen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8112-0757
Notes
1. We acknowledge the ambiguity of the term ‘Internet pornography’ and purposefully refrained
from imposing a definition of pornography allowing stakeholders to construct and navigate
the issues as they saw fit.
2. For instance, age verification may provide revenue opportunities through cross-platform mar-
keting and user registration fees.
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Author biographies
Caroline Keen’s research has focused on the political economy of Internet content regulation in
relation to children and illegal and potentially harmful content online. Her broader research exam-
ines the interests that shape emerging policies and practices around new digital technologies and
how these affect children’s rights to protection, privacy and digital participation.
Alan France is professor of Sociology and Associate Dean in the School of Social Sciences Te
Pokapū Pūtaiao Pāpori at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has published widely on
subjects such as youth and inequality, youth and social class and youth, crime and risk-taking and
youth social policy. His two most recent books are Understanding Youth in the Global Economic
Crisis (2016), Bristol: Policy Press and Youth and Social Class: Enduring Inequality in the UK,
Australia and New Zealand (2017), London, Palgrave: Policy Press, explore the continued ine-
quality that exists for young people in different parts of the globe.
Ronald Kramer is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Auckland. He has published
widely on issues of youth crime and punishment under neoliberalism. His current work focuses on
technology fetishism in the context of curtailing criminalised behaviours.