Theoretical Approaches

In 2013, the leftist coalition government of Iceland, led by Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the first female prime minister in the country’s history, announced it was going to introduce a parliamentary bill that would ban pornography in the print media and especially on the Internet. The government declared that Iceland, one of the most wired countries in our interconnected world, had had enough of violent pornography. The Icelandic minister of the interior, Ogmundur Jonasson, told reporters that the reason for the proposed ban was to protect children from the negative psychological impact of violent pornography that was readily available to them in real space and cyberspace. Jonasson’s proposal was the outcome of a lengthy consultation process on the negative impact of sexual violence. Participants in the consultation process had included the Ministry of the Interior; the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture; and the Ministry of Welfare. A wide range of experts, including the police, child welfare and protection specialists, lawyers, and members of the academic community, participated in the consultation exercise. The consensus of the experts was that pornography in general, and violent pornography in particular, was having a negative social impact on children in Iceland. The concern was that by being exposed to hardcore violence perpetrated in the context of sex, Icelandic children were being socialized into sex and violence by the pornography industry, not their parents or sociocultural institutions (Gunnarsdottir, 2013).