The Government’s porn ban failure is a betrayal of our kids
It’s about protecting children. Toxic porn culture is affecting an entire generation
It’s a month since the latest cohort of 11-yearold boys started secondary school. And what an education it will have been. Not in geography, chemistry or music – more biology (human) and history (search history, that is).
I say this with a heavy heart, but wherever two or more (or, indeed, fewer) were gathered together, they will have viewed pornography. On phones. On tablets. On laptops, in HD.
Not just adventures in anatomy. Not prompted by age-appropriate curiosity about bodies and what to do with them (albeit many years’ hence). I’m talking about nasty, brutish, misogynistic porn. Violence and degradation that is far more the stuff of horror movies than the well-thumbed magazines peddled round the back of the bikesheds back in the day.
This week, parents like me were horribly and shamefully betrayed by the Government, which announced plans for a “porn block” to stop children viewing adult material online have been dropped. I feel beyond angry.
The long-delayed measure would have required all adult internet users wanting to watch legal pornography to prove they were over 18 by providing some form of identification. It was first promised in 2015, and due to come into effect last year – but, after delaying tactics, it “will not be commencing” now. Why?
Among other sundry loopholes, privacy campaigners have bleated that the gathering of data would make it possible to connect an individual’s browsing habits to their identity, which could then be leaked. And so our Government, in all its pusillanimity, has decreed that grown-up embarrassment over their mucky internet history is more important than safeguarding the mental health of children who find themselves easily accessing porn so nasty, it made me feel nauseous.
If you are of a squeamish disposition, look away. If you are a parent don’t. You need to know what is out there. You need to feel rage, and to channel that rage.
At a keystroke on a starter smartphone, your child can see gang rapes in which young women are gagged with their own knickers, blindfolded, slapped and throttled until their eyes bulge. Men routinely urinate on women, truss them up like pieces of meat, jeer at them and abuse them. There are abusive step-parent scenarios. Bondage beatings. Undreamed-of public and private humiliations. It’s why young men these days refer to “doing sex to a girl”, as “opposed to having sex with her”.
There is no equality here, just powerful aggressors and ostensibly willing victims.
Oh, and anyone out there arguing there is no causal link between scenes of degradation and subsequent behaviour should hang their head.
Last month, a courtroom in Hull heard a now-17-year-old boy freely admit to a porn addiction. It led him to believe that rape wasn’t wrong, but exciting. And so he coerced and bullied his 14-year-old girlfriend into having sex with him “every day for several days”, over a period of 10 months, inflicting injuries on her using part of a broken bed, a drum stick and a hockey stick.
Her life has been ruined. Other lives, too. Porn addiction has been shown to fundamentally alter sexual behaviour, desensitise users to others’ emotions and inure them to violence.
An NSPCC report from 2016 found 48 per cent of 11-to-16 year olds had viewed porn online. In March of last year, Childline revealed that more than 2,000 children had sought counselling after stumbling on hardcore porn online; of those, one in 10 children who received help was aged 11 or under, and 63 per cent were 12 to 15.
The same month, UK Addiction Treatment Centres, which run clinics across the UK, said the number of teenage admissions for porn addiction has more than tripled over the last three years.
At a time when mental wellness has, quite rightly, become a major talking point, I struggle to understand why more is not being done to guard our young people’s health.
This has nothing to do with adult morality – I have no interest in what consenting grown-ups do or watch, as long as it’s legal – but a straightforward safeguarding of children. Not just boys, but girls; the repercussions of a toxic porn culture are affecting an entire generation.
Breaking the news about the axing of the block, Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan insisted “the Government’s commitment to protecting children online is unwavering”.
It doesn’t look like it from where I’m sitting. The issue is to be covered in a forthcoming Online Harms Bill, but any new regulator is not expected to be up and running until at least 2022.
Moreover, John Carr, from the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, points out that age verification companies have been set up, millions of pounds have been invested and the porn industry is primed for the change.
“What possible justification can there be to say ‘Let’s review this in the context of the Online Harms White Paper’?” he asks. “It could be two or three years before anything comes out the other end, meanwhile six and seven-year-olds are seeing hard-core pornography. It is absolutely shocking.”
So what are we parents to do? We can of course block access to certain sites on our children’s devices. But we can’t police their classmates’ technology, spy on their friends’ extra-curricular web browsing, or abolish Wi-fi.
The Government has a duty of care towards our children. We must call it to account, repeatedly, until it demonstrates that it gives a damn.