Digital Blind Spot

India must urgently enact a national law to protect its children from online pornography — if not from social media, then at the very least from explicit content. Legislation should ban access to adult pornography for children under 18, or at minimum, under 16. It must mandate both platform-level and device-based age verification using reliable AI systems to ensure accuracy. Platforms that fail to comply should face substantial fines and, if necessary, access restrictions to ensure accountability

- SRINIVAS MADHAV The writer is a transparency and quality advocate and author. The opinions are personal

India prohibits Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) under strong laws like the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, yet ignores the alarming issue of children accessing adult pornography and being exposed to it at a very young age—a serious legal and moral gap. The US Supreme Court, on June 27, upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children from seeing online pornography. The court's 6-3 majority opinion held that the law "advances the state's important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content."

Adults watching adult pornography is a personal choice and may not be illegal. A child watching adult pornography is entirely different—distressing and unnecessary. Yet, in India today, children of all ages under 18 can easily watch adult content—usually through smartphones owned by them or their parents. Children and adolescents now have more access to pornography than any generation in history. They are growing up in a digital environment where sexually explicit content is often just one click away, unfiltered and unmonitored.

Early exposure to pornography impacts not just their understanding of relationships and sexuality, but also their mental health, behavior, and long-term development. UNICEF has cautioned that early exposure to pornography can lead to poor mental health, increased sexism and objectification, sexual violence, and other adverse outcomes.

"Unprotected From Porn" (Carroll et al., 2025), published by the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, found that over 97 percent of boys and 78 percent of girls aged 12–18 have viewed pornography, mostly repeatedly and "existing research confirms that most pornography harms most children most of the time."