Taiwanese newspaper reports say the Internet's widespread offering of free porn has taken a large bite out of adult theater audiences in the country and driven the government and special interest groups slightly mad.
The Taipei Times reported June 26 that more than half of Taiwan's citizens have Net access, and Taiwanese teenagers are only too well aware of and exposed to porn, possibly at a higher rate than any preceding generation.
Interest groups like the non-profit Garden of Hope are said to be leading a charge against porn on and offline in Taiwan, the women's rights foundation saying porn causes promiscuity and even prostitution among teenagers, according to the Times.
"Our approach has two sides," said Garden of Hope chief executive Chi Hui-jung to the paper. "We fight for tougher laws against pornography on the one hand and, on the other, push to educate parents about what's out there and how they can keep their kids away from it. There is a consensus that something needs to be done to curb the availability of pornography on the Internet -- especially to keep it away from children. The difficulty is in agreeing on how to do it."
That question and the Garden of Hope's efforts helped spur the Internet Rating System Promotion Foundation, made of Internet service providers, government officials, and scholars, the Times said. This foundation's aim, the paper added, is to broaden porn awareness among Taiwanese Netizens after some Taiwanese Web portals were found inadvertently giving space to porn material and chats where prostitution was promoted heavily.
For now, Taiwanese anti-porn regulations include the local Children and Youth Sexual Crime Prevention Law, enforced by the Taipei City Police's Department of Internet Crime. But getting a nationwide piece of legislation dealing with Internet porn and blocking it from children, the Times said, is said to be difficult when freedom of speech considerations are taken in.
Also a problem, the paper said: language barriers and the rapid growth of new adult Websites in or reaching Taiwan make it difficult for filtering software to be effective and accepted countrywide.
