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The Australian government has announced a A$6.5 million to restrict minors’ access to pornography. It’s part of a $1 billion package to address . And it now comes alongside a proposal to .

The government will consider various methods, such as matching drivers’ licences, credit cards or passports against government databases. It may also explore analysing biometric information (such as faces, fingerprints or voices), and profiling online behaviour (like username, browsing history and cookie data). Each has different privacy risks.

While the government refers to these tools as “age assurance”, many of them are more accurately called “age estimation”.

Published in , our new study into one common facial age estimation tool shows such technologies are unreliable, and have a racial and gender bias.

They are also undesirable – they make pornography a and divert resources from evidence-based strategies that can actually help.

Framing pornography as the problem

The link between pornography and sexual violence is . In part, this is because existing research often and .

is not a homogeneous category. It includes horror, comedy, romance and documentary, and .

Sexually explicit media can play a role in of people excluded from mainstream media.

Despite this, to justify the increasing regulation of pornography. This includes construing porn as a . The idea of “porn addiction” has also been shown to .

The idea to “” was first raised by then-Minister for �Թ���վ Affairs Peter Dutton in 2019, the same year the government tried to introduce a to match people’s identities across government agencies.

Furthermore, research into shows that young adults are . Pornography can be a source of .

The technical limits of age estimation

Civil society groups have cited about age estimation tech. These include:

• accessibility issues for people without identity documents
• the potential burden on small, low-income websites
• queries about what data could be collected, sold or exploited
• and the likelihood of circumvention.

In the , young people “expressed their right to safe, autonomous sexual development and exploration”. They were concerned age assurance is of limited efficacy, and comes with .

Age estimation software that uses facial recognition relies on stereotypical indicators of age, , wrinkles and jawlines. These are highly variable – for example, wrinkles can be .

Studies that often has a significant .

In our research, our colleague used a to analyse a . He found the model was most accurate in estimating age in the “Caucasian” category and least accurate in the “African” category.

Boys were more likely to be misclassified than girls, especially in the 0-12 age bracket. People aged 26 and over were generally misclassified as younger, sometimes by as much as 40 years.

Age estimation is already a fraught task when done by humans, who regularly . It is no better when done by machines.

Supporting healthy sexual development

Overall, age-based restrictions on access are unlikely to stop people from viewing porn. Teenagers can and may even get around age checks using the dark web, putting them at .

Young people often from their parents. Sometimes, blurry understandings of “harm” from the media and angry responses from parents more than the actual porn they encounter.

The best approach to supporting healthy sexual development for young people is to “” with them about sex, especially if they can do so openly .

Part of healthy sexual development is understanding how sexual representations are . Porn literacy – a subset of media literacy – is about rather than taking an abstinence-based approach.

Evidence-based alternatives

Restricted-access approaches make a crude distinction between people over or under 18. But the various age groups under 18 have very different needs in relation to sex and relationships. Importantly, this includes 16- to 17-year-olds who can legally consent to sex.

For pre-pubescents, the biggest risk factor involving pornography is when adults use these materials . This shows governments must invest in community-led prevention and frontline services.

Meanwhile, post-pubescents need comprehensive sex and relationship education appropriate for their development. Its focus should be on providing the , including about consent, communication, gender diversity, non-monogamy, sexual experimentation .

Instead of barring under-18s from all porn, a more impactful approach would be to facilitate access to diverse sexual representations. This includes measures such as preventing and supporting worker-owned to flourish. It includes ending and .

Importantly, addressing gendered violence requires , who remain the most affected by family, police and carceral violence.

Age estimation for pornography access is not an easy fix for gendered violence. It will not support young people to contextualise the sexual media they come across. It will not address structural factors behind gendered homicide and sexual violence, including racism and misogyny. In reality, it will only introduce more problems, and at great cost – political and financial.

Zahra Stardust receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society as part of a project on Big Data and Sexual Surveillance. She is also the recipient of a grant from Forte, the Swedish Research Council for Health and Working Life on Digital Sexual Health: Designing for Safety, Pleasure and Wellbeing in LGBTQ+ Communities, and unrestricted Google Asia Pacific grant on AI generated intimate imagery. She is an individual member of Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association.

Alan McKee receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Society of Australian Sexologists.