Rocco Siffredi Calls for Porn Restrictions in Italy

ROME—AVN Hall of Famer Rocco Siffredi announced that he supports making porn harder to access in Italy as a means to restrict all minors from seeing age-restricted material.  Siffredi earned the praise of the right-wing Italian government for his words via the minister for the family, birth rate, and equal opportunities Eugenia Roccella, a conservative Catholic. According to the Italian news wire services ANSA, Siffredi supports Roccella’s campaign to stop youth from accessing online pornography in a format that is similar to U.S.-based attempts and the recent adoption of age verification by the French government. “Mr. Siffredi agrees with me that this must be stopped, possibly because he is a father,” Roccella said, based on reporting by ANSA’s English language service.  Roccella outlines that there might be a causal link between viewing what she categorizes as violent online porn to sexual assault and rape crimes.  “However, a direct causal link has not been proven,” she admitted.  The Times in London pointed out that a part of Roccella’s renewal to limit access to online porn is based on recent high-profile sexual assaults that have occurred across Italy in recent months.  One case that comes to mind for Roccella and her calls for restrictions is an act where a group of males raped a 19-year-old woman and posted it online in the Sicilian capital city of Palermo.  Another case of violence the minister points to occurred outside of the city of Naples, the regional capital of Campania, where a group of men raped two minors.  Reporting from Rome, The Times correspondent Tom Kington states that this pair of cases of sexual assault “have dominated headlines in Italy” all this past month. Siffredi sat in for an interview with an Italian language newspaper where he asked readers: “Why have they allowed the proliferation of accessible and free porn sites, easily viewed by very young kids which send them distorted messages about sexuality?” High-profile scientific and sociological studies from recent years show that viewing pornography, including “violent” pornography, very rarely leads to sexual violence or the commission of these sorts of crimes.  One study of high school-aged males found “no evidence for the proposal that online porn use encourages men to be sexually violent.”  Another study, which made international headlines in 2020, found that “at the population level, studies explored the relationship between pornography consumers and sexual violence and found that an increase in available pornography reduced sexual aggression.” AVN reported recently that claims that pornography is rife with widespread videos of violence against performers, particularly women, are often misconstrued by naive viewers as violent over actual play, potentially BDSM, and being a consensual sexual experience for all.