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How do we keep our kids safe online? How do we protect our children in an overexposed, sexualized culture?
Join Mandy Majors (award-winning author of "TALK" and "Keeping Kids Safe in a Digital World") for real conversations about the intersection of tech, culture and faith.
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Supreme Court: Age Verification for Porn Sites
Texas requires pornography websites to verify the age of the user. Porn companies/Free Speech Coalition has challenged this Texas law and in early 2025, the Supreme Court heard this case. We are currently awaiting a decision. Our guest from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation breaks this all down for us and explains the importance of this historical moment.
KEEPING KIDS SAFE ONLINE
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Welcome to the Next Talk podcast. We are a nonprofit passionate about keeping kids safe online. We're learning together how to navigate tech, culture and faith with our kids. I'm joined today by Lisa Thompson. She is at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Lisa, thank you for being here today.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me, Mandy.
Speaker 1:Well, explain to our listeners what you do at NACOSI. I hope I'm saying that correctly.
Speaker 2:Yes, you are. So the long way of saying it is the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, and we do say NACOSI for short because that is a bit of a long name to get out there. But at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. I've been there now for almost 10 years and my current role is I'm a vice president and I work in our research institute, which is we kind of try to get into the weeds in various studies that are out there on various topics related to sexual abuse and exploitation. Wonderful.
Speaker 1:So appreciative of all the work you guys are doing in DC and around the world really to start this conversation and the legislative front. It's so important and that is really what I want to talk about today. So there's a Supreme Court decision that we're awaiting and I want to back up first. Before it got to the Supreme Court, texas is saying we need age verification on pornography sites, and when we say that, I want to define that, what that is for people so they completely understand what age verification means. So can you tell us the details of that Texas law first and then let's move into why it's gone up to the Supreme Court?
Speaker 2:Right. Well, we could go back even further than the Texas law. A lot of people are not aware that back in the late 90s, the US Congress tried to establish age verification online, which is a way by which, if somebody is going to access something that we would consider that you need to be above a certain age. Because we recognize that children shouldn't be accessing certain kinds of material, they had passed a law which established an age verification requirement in order to access pornography online. Tragically, that law got overturned by the Supreme Court. Basically, that has opened the door for 20 years now to have an unfettered access to pornography sites by children. The idea then that was articulated by the Supreme Court was that, oh well, if parents are concerned, filters will do the job. Filters will be sufficient in order to protect children from seeing inappropriate materials online line, and if there ever was a false or just completely out of touch kind of decision, this was it right. The court really made a huge blunder here in saying that we had to rely 100% on filters. So for decades that has been the case and, tragically, a lot of parents don't utilize filters. But there's another host of problems. While some filters do a good job, there's a myriad of ways in which children can get exposed to pornography in online environments, largely because they're online in a lot of different ways, in different settings. And even if you have the most diligent parents and trying to police all this stuff and set up all these protections, there's loopholes, there's ways that people get around it. So, I mean, one of the easiest, of course, is just other children in their school environment. So let's say you're parent A, you've done everything to create that protective barrier around your children to help them not get exposed to pornography online. You've got filters on your devices, your home computer, on your gaming systems, on their handheld devices. You've done all that stuff. But your child goes to school. Their kid, their friends, their peers, have devices at school and their peers, their parents, aren't doing the same, and so their children have access to pornography and they say hey to your child. Hey, look at this. Look what I see Isn't this? Because that is what happened. That's such a common scenario over and over that other children get, you know, exposed children expose other children to pornography. At any rate, the court made a disastrous decision, and where? So? That has resulted in roughly 20 years of children having largely unfettered access to pornography.
Speaker 2:Now, yes, there's some families that do a lot of valiant work to try to protect their kids and they are maybe able to delay it, push off the age at which it happens, but invariably, children get exposed to pornography online. It's almost impossible, it's not a matter of if it's when your child gets exposed. I'm sure you've probably heard that expression before, and it's tragic because, also, it seems like the age at which children are getting exposed is just getting younger and younger, and once they're exposed, it's this moment you can't undo in their development. It's this watershed moment in their lives where something that was off, a switch that was off, gets flipped on. For many while it's initially confusing and maybe even alarming or startling to them, it sparks curiosity. Startling to them, it sparks curiosity, and I can't tell you how many times I've heard now adults who say, well, I saw that and I got curious, so I went back and I wanted to see more, and then that leads to this downward spiral, this cycle right, where they see it, they get curious and then they keep coming back to it because they're curious and then eventually they get excited by it. Right, their bodies respond to what they're seeing and for some, that's going to lead to a years, some cases decades long struggle with pornography use, pornography addiction. So that's where we have been and more and more people have been waking up to this problem. Right, it's impacted countless families across this country. I mean, I would have no problem. You know from my personal experience. I really think it's in the millions that this has happened to.
Speaker 2:The new movement to establish age verification laws really got kick-started in Louisiana. So there was a legislator there who got really concerned about this issue and decided to pass an age verification law there. Now the issue, the concern, has always been if these laws will pass constitutional muster because of this previous decision that was made way back. You know about the law that was passed in the late 90s. I think the final court decision came out in like the early 2000s. So that has been the real barrier or concern, because people have felt like their hands were tied in that anything they might pass would not pass constitutional muster based on this previous Supreme Court decision. But Louisiana passed this law. They started an age verification regime there. You know states and parents are all across the country are wrestling with this issue and those parents are all across the country are wrestling with this issue and those parents some of them are legislators and word got out and so then legislators across the country started passing similar bills and different variations on a theme, some of them trying to deal with some of the concerns that we had about the language and whether or not it would pass constitutional muster or not. So there have been tweaks, there's different variations out there, but now we have about 19 states across the country have passed age verification laws.
Speaker 2:So in terms of age verification, which you asked me very specifically about that, what does that mean? It's like it's just like we're trying to have a child or an adult. I should say an adult would be showing their ID to a clerk at a store. Or let's imagine a person has gone to a liquor store and they want to buy a bottle of something. They have to show their ID. I mean, many of us have been at the grocery store. Maybe you're getting a bottle of wine or something and even though maybe you look 30 or 40, they're IDing you to be very cautious to make sure that a minor is not buying something that, as a society, we have decided is inappropriate for children. This happens all the time in stores, brick and mortar stores all across the country and we've said, oh, to drive a car you have to be a certain age and we make sure you get a driver's license and we verify the age before the children can start. We've made a system where children can start training to get a driver's license. This has been the way we manage things in the brick and mortar world, but in the online world that hasn't been applied to the issue of pornography. Now, over the years, there are various sectors in the online space where age verification has been applied, like online gambling, for instance, is a good example where you cannot a child cannot just you know hop on onto an online gambling site.
Speaker 2:The Supreme Court has established this right to own pornography or to have pornography within your own home, but distributing this stuff if it's considered obscene, it's not legal. Now, most people are under the misconception that only material that depicts children is illegal. Any material that's depicting children involved in sexual activities that involves the exhibition of their genitalia, or even if it doesn't even have to be involved in sex acts or there can be just nudity. That kind of material is what they call per se contraband. It's that on the face of it, if that's what it has in it. It's illegal, you can't own it, there's not even a right to have it in your home. It's illegal material and as like a researcher or people doing research on this area, we're not even allowed to have it. And if we see it, we have to report it immediately. We can't download it, we can't save it. It's illegal to have. Period.
Speaker 2:Now, material that's depicting adults has to be adjudicated. It has to be determined Is this obscene? Does it meet the standard of obscenity, or is it something that has maybe some sort of redeeming value that we're going to permit in society? And there was a famous Supreme Court decision back in the 70s called Miller v California, where the Supreme Court established a three-part test to determine what kind of material meets the standard of obscenity. It's called the lapse test. But it has to do whether or not there's any literary value, if there's any artistic value to the material. If the community would consider it offensive, right, Like you wouldn't sit down and want to look at this material with your coworkers or with your family members. There's just something that is like. Automatically, you know it violates the community standards, right? So there's this three-part test that determines whether something is obscene or not.
Speaker 2:But the challenge is that Our prosecutors have to bring charges of obscenity against the people who distribute it. So we can't just march into a store on the street that's selling pornography. You and I can't. We would have to have a law enforcement investigation that would seize materials. A prosecutor would have to bring a case against the people who are distributing this material on charges of obscenity, and then there's a jury trial. The jury has to decide if this material that they're selling meets the standard of obscenity, and then the people who are distributing that content can be put in jail. And so that was happening.
Speaker 2:Back in like the 80s there was a under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan. He established a unit in the Department of Justice that was investigating and prosecuting obscenity cases all across the country, and so major distributors of hardcore pornography were going to jail. But that time we had we were talking mostly about like DVD type stuff. Because you know, pornography has migrated. It's shifted in terms of the format in which it's made available and is most consumed by the public, Whereas in the past, you know, it was maybe still photos or magazines and it more, it moved into video formats and went on to DVDs and then, of course, with the advent of the internet, it went online and at first it was just still grainy photos that people would collect and put up on forums and then, once streaming became available, it became videos and with high-speed powered internet, we got more and more vivid and realistic material online, and now we've even got AI-generated material out there. So there's been this. You know, as technology advances and changes, the porn sector is always taking advantage of those new developments to develop new ways to deliver pornography to consumers.
Speaker 2:I just want to say about the prosecutions in the 80s and 90s there was a tremendous amount of. There were just amazing number of cases brought against distributors of pornography. As I mentioned, they were going to jail. This was all done out of the leadership that was coming out of the Department of Justice, but that has to be a priority of the Department of Justice in order to bring these obscenity cases. To bring these obscenity cases.
Speaker 2:And then you have a change of administration. You have a backing off from. This was like oh, that's not a priority anymore, we're not going to do these, or you just get fewer and fewer in number till there are no obscenity prosecutions anymore, and so what you have happening is that, right at the time when pornography was shifting to the online space, you have a complete backing off from prosecutions of obscenity. So people have this idea that because well, it's on the Internet, it must be legal. They have this idea that all the pornography that's not involving children that's on the Internet is on the face, it's just legal. Face, it's just legal. So there's this huge misperception and misunderstanding about the law in the United States that has been fostered by the fact that the US Department of Justice has not brought an obscenity prosecution against online distributors of pornography in probably 15 to 20 years now. I mean, it's been a long time since we've had a prosecution of any kind of against for for distribution of obscenity.
Speaker 1:I mean what you're telling me is it is illegal really for pornography to be out there in the public sphere, but because the Department of Justice is not prosecuting it, it's, it's out there. Is that what?
Speaker 2:you're saying. Well, what I'm saying is that it has to be decided by a jury that the material that would be on a particular website meets the standard of obscenity. And if they have met that three-part test that was established by the Supreme Court in the 1970s which, I would argue any mainstream pornography site out there today would be violating the test, the Miller test. I don't think there'd be any problem of convicting these online distributors of pornography of obscenity distributors of pornography of obscenity. So that's a very specific word. So they're not allowed to distribute obscenity. Now, perhaps there's some pornography out there that some community might not consider obscene. Certainly what's been available on the mainstream, the most popular platforms, I think, would reasonable juries would find obscene. It wouldn't be a hard bar to pass to get over that bar. What I'm saying is distribution of obscenity, whether it be on cable television, through the US mails or on the internet. That's illegal. Distribution of obscenity is illegal, but the US Department of Justice has not prosecuted obscenity in a long, long time, so it looks like it's legal.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you for that history lesson. That is very valuable information. And Louisiana and all of these states that are joining in on age verification, I mean that's been started in the last couple years, right, and that has resurrected.
Speaker 2:Right, it's been recent, I'd say within the last five years. I can't remember precisely what year the Louisiana law was passed, but it did spark. It was a watershed moment that sparked many other states to jump into this fight, because I think people recognize, lots of people are aware that this is a serious problem, but they just felt like they didn't know how to move forward and they were inspired by what? By what Louisiana did. And so now there's at least 19 states that have age verification laws in place and there's many other states that are moving to do something similar.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I wanted to point out, and I loved your example of going into a brick and mortar store with an ID. I think of an R-rated movie too. Like an underage person cannot go into an R-rate in our state anyway, I think that was a great example of going into a brick and mortar store needing to share your ID. So what we're talking about here with age verification is, in order to access a pornographic website, a screen just pops up where you have to verify your identity and you have to enter your birth date. Is that correct, like it's as simple as that, or is it? It's different? Okay, it would be different than that.
Speaker 2:Explain that to us Right. So this is where I think a lot of the fear mongering comes in by the opponents of age verification, because they are alleging that in order to do age verification, there's going to be some great big database that's collecting your information and storing it and it's going to know everything about the people who are going into pornography sites online. But that's not how the technology works at all. So there is an association of what they call the Association of Age Verification Providers. It's a big formal association of many different companies that provide different forms of age verification technology and there's assortment of ways which a person's age can be determined by these companies using amazing forms of tech. It's just so incredible what's possible now. For instance, there's one company that if you hold up your hand in front of the camera and you make these I don't know, it's like three different hand motions. They can tell how old you are by your hand Just seeing your hand make these certain motions and they keep the resolution grainy so they can't get. They can't possibly zoom in and get your fingerprints resolution grainy, so they can't get. They can't possibly zoom in and get your fingerprints, but you just make these three hand motions whammo, they just you're.
Speaker 2:You're over 18 and you can go on to get on to the some mature site, some site for I don't know shopping for alcohol or for if you wanted to gamble or something, or obviously, to pornography sites. There's other means of doing it as well. I'm trying to remember. But what is important here is that the age verification providers they do not store people's data. There's not some database that's keeping your date of birth, that's keeping your name. There's nothing like that. Some of the providers can actually do it by checking other information about you that's already out there in the public sphere, like whether or not you have a mortgage. They can check that way and then, once it's verified, it's a one-time thing. It's not like you're having to go and verify your age every single time you're trying to get on these sites and it's relatively inexpensive to do so. It's just incredible. And in fact they submitted.
Speaker 2:The Age Verification Providers Association submitted a fantastic brief to the Supreme Court in this recent case that is kind of what is the impetus for our conversation today which deals with a law in Texas, an age verification law in Texas.
Speaker 2:And so the age verification provider submitted this brief to the court, which is basically giving the Supreme Court in this case background information that they need to be aware of in order to help them make their decision when they're considering what to do. What was astonishing is that you have actually, when you have engaged in an age verification process online, you are revealing less about yourself than if you were to hand your driver's license to a grocery store clerk, because that grocery store clerk can see your address, they can see your picture, they can see your date of birth. It's being flashed out in the air. Maybe some camera could take a picture of it, who knows?
Speaker 2:But, like, there's more information about you that is publicly accessible in that moment at the grocery store checkout than there is by doing age verification online. And there's really a huge amount of standards that they have that make sure that they're protecting people's privacy and, like I said, it's this one-time check and it's over, and they do not they absolutely do not want to be keeping the data. There's not any possibility of a hack because they're not storing anything. There's not any possibility of a hack because they're not storing anything.
Speaker 1:So it's incredibly safe technology and this is where the opponents of age verification are trying to raise a whole lot of fear about it, because people have this misperception that it's creating a database of information about people. Well, I assume this same age verification like that putting your hand in front of the camera is being used now on gambling sites too. Right, so that's the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in fact, some pornography sites are already using age verification and yeah, it's already in use by companies all across the world who are, for various reasons, need to make sure that their consumers are over a certain age.
Speaker 1:So the argument of that it's collecting and storing data like it's already out there, like you're already doing that through other age verification sites.
Speaker 2:Well, no, what I'm saying is that the age there. There is publicly accessible data about people out there that an age verification company can access to say, yes, you're over 18. But they're not storing that data, they don't keep it and hoard it. There's information out there that, like, for instance, we could go online I could probably figure out, mandy, if I knew, like, where you lived and if I knew your address, I could probably find out some information about the value of your home. I might be able to find out, if I was good at this, like how much if you have a mortgage on your home.
Speaker 2:That's what these companies are looking for Indicia, you know, indicators that you are an adult by records that are publicly available out there. They're not keeping and storing that information. That's the point I really want to make clear here. They're not collecting and storing that information. Yes, that's the point I really want to make clear here. They're not collecting and storing information. They're doing this process to say quickly, ascertain, oh, this is an adult. And then they just say click, yeah, you're an adult, and you move on. That's it, it's over.
Speaker 1:So one of these largest age verification companies submitted a brief to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2:It's an association, it's like a whole group of them that has a trade association. They all agreed and they together submitted a brief to the.
Speaker 1:Supreme Court, okay, saying we're not storing the data. This is a normal process. Okay, right, okay, great. So I do want to back up, just for people who may not have followed this case. So we've got Louisiana and 19 states, including texas, saying we want age verification for pornography sites. Texas gets sued over this, right, texas in particular. Is there a reason that texas was singled out something different in our law, or was it just it was brought here because I know I'm in texas and I know if I go to Pornhub right now, there's a letter that's basically saying we are being sued, we're going to the Supreme Court. Like that's what I get, which is awesome, for you know, I do work with with young kids being exposed to porn. So I'm like that is fantastic that there's a stop and it just doesn't pop up when you're searching something.
Speaker 2:You know, I wish I knew why they picked Texas first. I don't know why they sued Texas instead of Louisiana or one of the other states, but they did choose to sue the state of Texas. And so that state that that case, which is now currently worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, is called FSC v Paxton. So FSC stands for Free Speech Coalition. That is a really fancy name for the porn industry lobby. I mean, they're so clever, right? They're not saying, oh, we're the Pornography Association providers or whatever. No, they're the Free Speech Coalition. So that's how they style themselves as protectors of free speech, when they're really just purveyors of horribly degrading material that is addictive and damaging to people. But that's how they build themselves.
Speaker 1:So this group that is suing Texas, that is kind of like an association to yes pornography.
Speaker 2:So it's not just Pornhub but it's other companies right, there's several other largest company involved, but they're yeah, they're involved, but the I'm not sure all the entities that are a part of the FSC, the Free Speech Coalition. But it is a pornography association trade association, just like the Age Verification Providers Association. They're an association of most of the major players in that industry. The Free Speech Coalition is basically the mouthpiece of the porn industry. It's a spokesman. It's advocating to regulate pornography and children's accessibility to it.
Speaker 1:The FSC is often involved in those cases. Well, and in just a practical level, having conversations with our kids at home about the free speech component, I know one thing that I say and I don't know if it's accurate. You may want to speak into this, but I always say to my kids like free speech, like I'm not saying they can't have the site, I'm saying it shouldn't be accessible to minors. To me that's a huge difference than banning all porn, and I mean I would be for banning all porn. But I understand the free speech argument a little bit there. What do you think? What would you say to that? Because that's just a conversation we've had in our home about this issue and about pornography being labeled like a free speech issue.
Speaker 2:If pornography is speech. What kind of speech is it? What is it saying? What is it communicating? Would you have this speech in public, with your friends, with your family? It's so indecent, it's so debasing of those involved and it's mostly it's terribly debasing of women. I don't consider it speech, but if I did consider it speech, I would consider it hate speech. It's a form of hate. It's a degrading of the idea of free speech. To me, like you're saying, like free speech is an ideal in our country, it's this lofty thing where we're able to articulate great ideas or or disagree over big ideas. But pornography is so debasing to those, to everybody involved in it and in creating it, and it's sending these absolutely horrific messages about humans and human sexuality and how, what, what sex is about, and it's just terrible. So I guess I would probably come up with something along those lines.
Speaker 2:It's been a while since I've talked about that, so I need to brush up on it.
Speaker 1:No, I think that's a great conversation starter, especially with our older teenagers, who may understand a little bit more about how detrimental it is. You know, and from our work, like in our nonprofit world we've we see that pornography fuels abuse, like like I mean 100% of the families we've helped, where a kid has abused another kid sexually, pornography is always involved, like porn is the perpetrator here, and so you know it fuels abuse, it fuels trafficking, it fuels the demand for trafficking. There's so many arguments that can be made that it could be hate speech and I love that how you said that, I think that's very good and speech and I love that how you said that. I think that's very good and a good conversation starter in our homes with our kids.
Speaker 2:There's been research that looks at the titles of pornography films on the mainstream sites and they were assessing it for themes of sexual abuse and violence, right so that there's a study that came out of the UK and they found like really high incidence of titles indicating abuse on the home pages just the home pages, the titles that they were looking at. So the people who would land on the home page particularly if you're a kid, like immediately you're getting socialized to these ideas that are involve sexual violence and abuse or exploitation just by visiting a homepage of a pornography site. What I was astounded by recently was just how much there's been a growth in the normalization, say, for instance, of incest in step relationships. Okay, so one of the biggest purveyors of pornography will say, oh well, we don't have, we don't permit anything that's incest. But you go on their website and the titles is step this step, this step, this step. Dad, step sister, mom. You know everybody in these, it's in these incestuous step relationships. So they don't consider a step relationship relationship a family relationship. And I just think this is egregious, because how many of us know somebody who was abused as a stepchild, right Over and over and over the cases of abuse that are perpetrated against children. It's so many of the times it's a step relative. I don't think anybody who works in sexual abuse and exploitation would deny that abuse of children is a huge problem within step families.
Speaker 2:And now you have these websites that normalize this on a massive scale and, in fact, interesting. I was just reading a study yesterday and this came out in 2014. It was looking at tags. Basically, when people upload content to pornography sites, they give it terms that enable people to search to try to find what they're looking for. It's like shopping you want to find what you want to consume more easily. So there's literally thousands of terms that people will use to describe the pornography that they're uploading. One of the most common terms were mother, sister, brother, father. This was like more than 10 years ago. Those were the most common, some of the most common search terms that they the tags that they found on the content that was being uploaded to some of these, to two sites in particular. So my point is that there's just this speech that is on these sites fuels abuse.
Speaker 1:That's kind of on a side note on how to talk to our kids about this free speech argument. But the Supreme Court we're not saying your porn sites have to come down. The Supreme Court and the Texas law. The debate is the age verification. We're not trying to get it labeled hate speech. We're not trying to get it taken down. We're simply saying you know Texas is saying we want age verification and the lobbyists for the porn industry have come in and said no, this is against our free speech Right. So this is now at the Supreme Court and they have heard the case correctly.
Speaker 2:Yes, they had oral arguments in January. So you had the state of Texas presenting their arguments, you had the porn industry presenting their arguments. It was pretty encouraging because the justices did come down pretty hard on the porn industry representative. The guy who was arguing on their behalf. There was a lot of really hard questions for him. The guy who was arguing on their behalf. There was a lot of really hard questions for him. So we're optimistic that there will be a favorable decision. But it's hard to say. It's like trying to read tea leaves. We feel cautiously optimistic, I would say.
Speaker 1:Do we know when we expect a decision from the Supreme Court? Any time estimate?
Speaker 2:Well, it could be any time between now and the end of June.
Speaker 1:Say that the age verification is upheld. That's what we want. We want it to be upheld in Texas, so I assume if that happens, then the other states there may even be more joining in because of this Supreme Court decision.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I would think so. And then my other question is could that possibly lead to a federal age verification law at some point, or what do?
Speaker 2:you think. I do think that if the Supreme Court were to uphold the lower court's decision, the Fifth Circuit's decision in FSC v Paxton, that that would be a really positive signal for other states to join in in passing some sort of age verification law. So I would say that it would definitely be a very strong motivator for states that maybe have been waiting on the sidelines, concerned that why go through this effort if it might get struck down? If the Supreme Court upholds the Fifth Circuit decision or upholds it but still tells the Fifth Circuit they need to do a little tweaking, that is a very positive sign for us and for states who would like to join in doing something on this. So I think this seems like it's pretty much in the state's hands right now.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, thank you so much for that breakdown. You gave us a lot of history that we didn't even know. You know went back decades of history on this, which was great. You know you laid out for us exactly what is at stake here with this Supreme Court decision. Is there anything else that you want to add? Our listeners are all parents, so if there's anything else you want to add to them, as they're getting more educated about what's happening and being able to talk at home about the Supreme Court case, Well, one thing I should go back to address is the issue of federal matters on this.
Speaker 2:So there are different pieces of legislation that are being proposed in Congress that are intended to help prevent childhood exposure to pornography various bills. One of them in particular is called COSA, the Child Online Safety Act, which is something that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation has been very supportive of. So I don't want to suggest that we can only deal with this at the state level, but so far you know, the age verification has definitely been a state's led front. You know move part of the movement, but there are various federal pieces that of legislation that are hopefully will pass this year. Cosa died at the very last minute last year.
Speaker 2:People were heartbroken because it would have been the first big piece of child protection legislation on the internet in two decades. We can't bury our heads in the sand. We can't hope that this won't happen to your child. You basically have to assume that it will. This won't happen to your child. You basically have to assume that it will and you want to be as proactive as possible about giving them the skills to help handle that, navigate that situation when it happens and to make sure that you are the person that they know they can come talk to, that you are their safe person, that when something, when they see something that they're troubled about or they see pornography, that they know they can come talk to you.
Speaker 2:And not I'm sure it's hard because you, the instinct would be to have that panic moment and to be all reactive and upset. You know, to let our upset come through, because we don't. We're just heartbroken when this happens. Right, because it's a disruption, it's an irreversible disruption to their childhood and their innocence. But we have to maintain our composure and then deal with our emotions elsewhere so that we're not making creating fear in our children when this happens, but just creating that, that open door where they can come to you and be you. You're that person they can come to about these issues. But definitely, definitely, definitely being proactive and doing everything we can to delay that moment.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. We call that. Avoid crazy parent mode at Next Talk. That's what we call that, and I've been in crazy parent mode a lot and had to go back and apologize. And what's really cool about that is going back to apologize is beautiful, because I can say I wasn't mad at you, you brought that to me, you did everything right. I'm mad that you're growing up in a world that that's available on your computer. It shouldn't be explaining to them why I was upset, but not mad at them and and creating that safe space. I mean, it's just so so important. Lisa, thank you for being with us, thank you for that history lesson and bringing us up to speed, and we're going to be waiting for the Supreme Court decision on this.
Speaker 2:Great Well, we'll hope everybody will be, you know, keeping this in their thoughts. If they're praying, people pray about it. It's a big moment. It could be a major watershed and a big shift in how our country has been dealing with this issue, and it would be a huge step forward for child protection in our country if the Supreme Court upholds the Texas law.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Thank you for all you do at Nicosi and all of your team. We really appreciate your work, thank you Great being with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, too, for what you do.
Speaker 3:Next Talk is a 501c3 nonprofit keeping kids safe online. To support our work, make a donation at nexttalkorg. Next Talk resources are not intended to replace the advice of a trained healthcare or legal professional, or to diagnose, treat or otherwise render expert advice regarding any type of medical, psychological, legal, financial or other problem. You are advised to consult a qualified expert for your personal treatment plan.