Should governments control pornography?

"But the best weapon against misinformation is the truth, not ... silence", and so concludes The Economist's opinion piece "Generation XXX: Pornography" (2015). The Economist is discussing pornography, specifically the massive amount of pornography that is now available online,. While it points out that today more than 10% of internet searches are for the delights of the "estimated ... 700m-800m" pages of sexual entertainment, it also notes that this is a massive decline from the early days of the internet (the 1990s), when about half of all searches were for pornography.

I like the concluding sentence of the article because it very concisely states an important fact behind the reasons for academic work: academics seek truth and understanding, both very difficult to get, and with a few exceptions, ever uncertain. This is why academic freedom, like free speech for citizens, is so extremely important: if you cannot freely discuss a topic, then you cannot have informed opinions of any worth on the censored topic. For example, for many centuries in the Western world, it was illegal to say anything negative about the ruling version of Christianity, Catholicism under the popes in Rome, or about any Christian belief. The punishment was typically prison, torture and execution as a heretic, blasphemer or apostate (being devotedly Christian plainly does not make people moral). The result was not only that science, our knowledge about the world was retarded since the popes said that the Bible said that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, but many abuses such as selling indulgences (bribing god's men on Earth to get into heaven after death) by popes, bishops, priests and others could not be corrected because they could not be discussed. Eventually, this led to the Reformation which happily smashed the power of the popes just as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo smashed the idea that religion was a reliable source of knowledge about the world we live in.

And that reminds me of the modern abuses by religious leaders: sex abuse, usually of children, by Christian priests, Buddhist monks and others. Unlike teenagers, or old people, watching pornography on the computer screen, the disgusting abuse of children entrusted to their care by religious people is a crime that causes very real harm. Of course, the priests, bishops, monks and other "holy and good" religious people have been committing sex crimes against children forever, at least for millennia. But it is only very recently that the silence has been increasingly broken so that the misinformation could be corrected. In this case, the ugly truth being protected by a cover of wonderful looking misinformation was that men, and also women, in positions of power in religion abused the children in their care. When I was growing up, the social consensus was so strong that it was impossible for their child victims to speak out against sexual and other abuse committed by priests and others against children. Thankfully, this has changed greatly since the 1980s, and today the monsters in clerical robes are no longer protected by those robes but are being called to account and punished for their crimes against children.

I got quite off topic, but not entirely: it is worries about their children, as The Economist notes, that cause parents and others to want governments to ban or at least limit internet access to pornography. The Economist thinks this is a mistake, arguing instead that the healthy solution for children is, as the Danish are now doing, to talk to kids about pornography, and not into a fuss when they look at it, as they naturally will. As The Economist also reports, a 2013 study showed that, likely due to the social convention against free and open discussion, only 79 out of 2,000 academic papers on the effects of pornography on children "based their conclusions on solid evidence." This ignorance that leads to policy decisions is not healthy.

_______________________________________ 

My question is:
To what extent, if any, should governments be involved in the regulation of pornography?

___________

Reference

Generation XXX: Pornography. (2015, September 26). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21666614-free-pornography-ever-more-plentiful-online-right-response-involves-better-sex