Peace River-Westlock MP Arnold Viersen has introduced the Stopping Internet Sexual Exploitation Act in the House of Commons.
Viersen says it would require those making or distributing pornographic material for a commercial purpose to verify the age and consent of each person depicted.
“The context of this bill is the MindGeek and PornHub situation where images of young girls have been showing up there without their consent and in so many cases, them being underage. This bill would require publishers and creators to verify the age of consent and have a document to do that.”
The bill would put two pieces into the criminal code requiring people to maintain documents for verifying age and consent of people depicted in pornographic material.
Viersen says he hopes this will lead to the federal government taking action on underage and non-consensual pornographic content online.
“Currently one of the challenges is that if it’s an underage person that’s showing up on a pornographic website, the police are required to prove the age of that individual. This would reverse the onus so that the company would have to prove the age of the actor, then if they weren’t able to do that there’s a charge that comes with that.”
It also would prevent the distribution of pornographic material when consent has been withdrawn.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
