Starting January 1st, 2025 Florida joined the list of states that porn, or at least one of the more popular porn sites Pornhub, is blocked. I can't help but get a similar feeling that I used to get while still being in the classroom in the Sunshine State. Yes, this is still a blog on public education just hang in there for me.
According to the Daily Mail the states where Pornhub is blocked are: Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Indiana, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Florida. That is 16 states most of which are located below the Mason-Dixon Line.
In an article written by Zak Doffman in Forbes, he discusses how it's being presented and enforced to protect children from accessing these sites, while that's up for debate itself let's explore it from just that angle. The site now requires you to submit a photo of your ID, which all of your personal information showing, to access the site. This has left many adults outraged as they don't want to share all of that information... I wonder why, but that's honestly none of my business.
Florida has seen a huge spike in VPN usage in the last week. VPNMentor told [Forbes that they] “detected a surge of 1150% in VPN demand [in Florida] in the first few hours” after the new law came into effect on Jan. 1, which they describe as “staggering.” The team also reported “a noteworthy 51% spike in demand for VPN services in [Florida] on Dec. 19, 2024, the day after Aylo released their statement of geo-blocking Florida IP addresses to access their website.”
Now why again is this on a blog about public education? Simple, why is there no accountability on the parents to protect their children from these adult sites? It's given me the chance to reflect on how parents, while not always but far too often, took a backseat to keeping their children safe from pornography. I brought up the VPN topic because if you don't think 14 year olds know how to use a VPN you're delulu.
Parental involvement is the best way to keep kids safe, that is a straightforward fact. I would be remiss however, if I didn't acknowledge that raising children in this modern age comes with its own set of unique challenges that weren't present in generations that came before us. The internet is one of those challenges. The kids know about VPNs and they know more than adults in general far beyond how to convert a PDF to a Word document. Certainly a parental control app like Aura, Bark, and Qustodio, ranked the Top 3 on parentalcontrolnow.org would be a good place to start.
As a teacher who left the classroom after 7 years I saw it all. When I first started as a substitute teacher I took a job as a paraeducator where for a week I followed around a 12 year old autistic boy in general education classes to "make sure he wasn't watching porn on his phone." When I asked why his phone wasn't taken away, I got looks of, "you don't think we've tried talking to the parent?" from the administrators.
I caught students looking at porn during passing time when I was a high school teacher. I wonder if I should've reported it being a mandated reporter. During my very first year of teaching, I had a student enter my classroom and state the following, "Miiiiiisssss, the porn I watched last night was ranked 98% and she earned it with that ass." The student was 16 years old. I didn't know how to react so I ignored the student and told his basketball coach. The coach told me he had a conversation with him and had him do "full court runs" until he puked.
Then there was the time where I sat across the room from two very concerned parents who wanted to know why their sons Language Arts teacher hadn't prevented their son from watching porn on a friend's phone in her class. I was mortified for the teacher as she about cried from embarrassment, but was thankful it wasn't me. I have a few similar stories where parents were upset that their kid was exposed to porn by another student either in the classroom, on the playground, at lunch or the most common -- on the bus.
I also witnessed an extreme case of a 6th student who came to school telling his science teacher that he watches porn with his Dad on their living room television. This was after being caught completing a factory reset of his school issued laptop so that he could watch porn on the bus. He had taught about 4-5 other students how to reset their laptops before getting caught. It sent notifications to our schools IT department when a computer was reset to prevent exactly what was happening. The students were banned from using laptops for awhile and the teachers had to print out work for them instead of assigning and having them complete work online on computers. See how that absolved the parents of any responsibility and put it on the teacher's shoulders? Interesting.
Let me be clear that keeping children safe should be every adults responsibility. I appreciate that Pornhub has actually stepped up to protect children from viewing their site. It is in their best interest .to keep kids off their site. Their efforts though don't mean much unfortunately when what the real issue is uninvolved parents who don't take responsibility for their children's safety.
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