Mom sues porn sites for noncompliance with Kansas age assurance law

You can mess with the law – but don’t mess with the moms who catch their sons in compromising acts.

A Kansas mom is suing up to a dozen porn sites for violating the state’s new age assurance law. She took action after finding her 14-year-old child – named in the court document as “Q.R.” – on sites including Chaturbate.com, Jerkmate.com, Superporn.com and Hentaicity.com, after the age gate law passed in July 2024.

“Q.R., using his mother’s old laptop, had unfettered access to the internet and began searching for hardcore pornography,” says the court. His mom claims this led to “pain, suffering, disability, disfigurement, and mental anguish; psychological injury; past and future love of enjoyment and pleasure of living.” The fourteen-year-old “was able to access chaturbate.com on thirty different instances.”

Kansas’ law says that, if someone can access an explicit site without being prompted for age verification, they can report it to the attorney general, “who may seek a monetary penalty from the commercial entity (the website).” This includes private actions by parents or guardians.

Mom is joined in her lawsuit by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).

For its part, Chaturbate has responded: “around January 1, 2025, after receiving notification from Plaintiff concerning the events laid out in this Complaint, in an effort to sustain their commercial operations in the state of Kansas, Defendants ostensibly employed age verification techniques that ask users for government issued ID.”

Coverage in Mashable notes that Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term, calls for a ban on pornography and the imprisonment of its creators. There is fear that age assurance laws may be leveraged as a “back door” to a full ban.

Nonetheless, states continue to pursue age assurance legislation in increasing numbers.

Coverage from 12News notes that Arizona’s House Bill 2112, passed this month, will also allow parents to hold pornographic sites accountable if their child accesses the site’s content. Arizona becomes the 24th state requiring porn sites to implement age verification, joining Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, Utah, Montana, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, Idaho, Florida, Kentucky,

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  lawsuits  |  legislation  |  United States