I could not feel more guilty if my grandchildren had walked in on me watching porn: I found myself defending David Cameron this week. Please don’t tell my sisters.
I made the mistake of actually reading a version of his {speech: http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2013/07/22/david-cameron-s-porn-speech-in-full} as opposed to the numerous warped accounts of it.
I had initially thought that the conflation of child abuse and young people’s access to pornography was an indefensible piece of sleight of hand. But, while David Cameron might be quite comfortable with the conflation of the issues in the press, he did make the distinction very clear in his speech.
He also protects himself to some extent from the charge that he is asking for the impossible by pretty much accepting that there is no way to achieve all he wants at the moment, addressing the ‘search engines’ thus : ‘If there are technical obstacles to acting on this, don’t just stand by and say nothing can be done; use your great brains to help overcome them.’ That is a pretty desperate position but it has been known to work before, and fail lots – whether it turns out to be Churchillian or delusional remains to be seen.
Of course, the great attack on child abuse for an online audience would be more credible if it was backed with sufficient funding.
As to the use of family friendly filters, I am intrigued by an apparent contradiction in the opposition: on the one hand, the default filter is a threat to freedom and constitutes unwarranted censorship and on the other it will be readily circumvented. You can just about argue both but you cannot possibly worry about the former if you are convinced of the latter. But my only defence of Cameron under this head is that he does not pretend that the use of such filters is a cure-all. It’s true that there is less about education (of parents and children) in his speech than there is about filters in his speech but it is a respectable chunk and the parental complacency issue is directly addressed too. (I might add that, in this sphere as in all others affecting children, it is worth remembering that most children turn out fine despite the fact that lots of parents are rubbish at parenting.)
I have not joined the David Cameron fan club (his speech included ‘In schools up and down our country, from the suburbs to the inner city’ – how metro navel-gazing is that?). But I have one question to raise that I have not seen raised elsewhere, although it no doubt has been.
When I read his remark that ‘for a lot of children, watching hardcore pornography – is in danger of becoming a rite of passage’ my reaction was that it has always been so. It is just the definition of ‘hardcore’ that has changed. It made me think about the age issue and also the difficulties encountered by the music industry with peer-to-peer file-sharing.
I don’t want 8-year-olds exposed to porn, accidentally or otherwise. (But for that matter, I don’t want them reading a number of national newspapers, some ‘teen’ magazines (the publishers of which know very well that their market includes younger people) and loads of music videos (even though I believe that music videos are artistically superior to most feature films).) But if we are saying that porn is only to be available to 18-year-olds than we are entering cloud-cuckoo land.
Make the filters effective until, say, 13 but don’t make teens ask their Dad to turn off the filter so they can watch porn. The very idea is madness.
Which brings me to the music industry comparison. The supposed ruination of the music industry, greatly exaggerated as it always was, seems to have been turned around by easy access to buying and listening to music online – iTunes and Spotify etc. So what we really need for teens is {i}easy{/i} access to ‘porn’ that shows sex can be fun, and ‘dirty’, in a loving environment – in the ideal world it would be both easy to access and still forbidden. How we achieve that is beyond my expertise, although it would make a hell of a research project.
In England and Wales a 17-year-old can have sexual intercourse with his 16-year-old girlfriend but commits a criminal offence if he retains a copy of a picture of her naked (seriously, that’s child porn). Where such madness is defended, the chances of us getting our attitudes to the sexual curiousity of young people in any sort of order are slim. But, for me, setting up barriers is fine, even if they are flimsy. Setting them at the right height for the right age-group must surely be crucial.
