Porn has fuelled a 400% increase of child on child assaults

I have a bit of a problem with the idea that the parents are falling down on the job here. Some of them may be contributing, of course, but when the whole society is soaked in given bigotries, the power of parents to insulate their kids is limited. The children learn from media, other kids, ads, everything.

Expecting parents to compensate for a social problem is like expecting an individual to solve a lack of mass transit, or to solve an economy that forces climate change.

Porn at this point, heterosexual porn certainly, is out and out hate speech. Gail Dines as well as Julie Bindel, Robert Jensen, and other brave souls, have done the research so we don't have to. They lay out the full atrocity of what porn is now. It has the usual effects of hate speech: the small number of people who want to do more than dream go out and torture and murder the targets.

Like others have said, the problem isn't children seeing it. It's anyone being subjected to that garbage.

The age-verification will only apply to the more "reputable" porn sites. These sites have some limits on what they will list so at the very least, the content is legal.

The rest of the internet will still have vast amounts of completely unregulated porn that will be easily accessible. You might just have to go to the 2nd search page rather than click on the first result.

There is loads of porn on sites that won't even be included in this age-verification requirement - Reddit, Twitter etc

It's a sticking plaster to fix a severed limb. Probably worse than nothing at all because it makes people think that porn will be inaccessible to children when it's really not going to help at all. In fact it will push them to the least regulated sites.

I think that even making it less likely for young children who are not explicitly looking, to come across it, would be good.

It's important to remember that the parental controls supplied at router can fail, and I think a lot of parents rely on these.

Recently with new phone I searched hamster for DD spelt it wrong hanster and bingo it assumed I had misspelt a well known porn site. Not a small animal. This is driven by user behaviour, porn is the most viewed thing in the net. That means it returns often and with things that are innocuous. The search engines could assist here by only returning if the search is more deliberate. That would prevent some smaller kids seeing it by accident with minimum impact on the people who want to see it.

Ultimately the net like many places is not child or often woman friendly. The difference is of course its in our homes.

Something needs to be done about the situation with porn, the level of violence and degradation of women, the racism, the representation of illegal content. Its utterly corrosive and cements really awful dynamics around men women and sex and increasingly younger ages.

But putting limits on porn so that its harder for kids to get hold of is a horrible horrible thing that might make some adults have to stop and do some ID check or something before being able to view porn! Totally unacceptable. Bloody prudes.

It's horrible isn't it Quentin? There's a very disturbed boy in DS's class (from the way he back-chats his mum, there's definitely engrained misogyny in the way his dad treats his mum, and I strongly suspect DV). The boy was already in trouble with the police aged 10 for sexually harassing a class mate. And had a smartphone. So I had to sit down with DS when he was 10 and have the porn talk, in as age appropriate a way as I could, trying not to scare the shit out of him, and leave him with as much of his childhood intact as I could.

Not because I wanted to, or thought it was appropriate, but because I had to. Because if I didn't and this kid showed him stuff, he'd be really upset, confused and screwed up by it (he may still be, but hopefully I've given him some tools to contextualise it, and he knows he can talk to me about it).

It just makes me so incredibly sad and fucking angry that I have to do this because of fucked up adult men who hate women and prioritize their sadistic, fetishistic orgasms over all other considerations, running a multi billion dollar industry whose tentacles stretch everywhere, and who want to fuck up my son's psychological well-being.

Yeah, I have had some very explicit convos with my 14 year old

It won't work on a technical level, Quentin.

As an example, consider the "great firewall of China" which blocks YouTube (among other things). A friend told me within half an hour of landing in China his teens were happily watching YouTube using a VPN they'd installed to get round their school's net nanny. If teens can get round the Great firewall of China that easily, I suspect they'll get round whatever half arsed solution the government contracts a Pornhub subsidiary to put in place.

Also, Prawn's point applies. Your internet security may be tight, but what happens in friends' houses? The dad is a pornhound, the kids work out his PIN, sneak downstairs in the night during a sleepover and watch dad's laptop.

It's horrible but that's the truth of the situation.

I'm trying to approach it with my son by age appropriate talk, talk and more talk. Consent. Keep stressing that it's meant to be fun for both parties. That you should only ever be having sex with someone you like and respect. That friends will, over the next few years, show you stuff in their phones that is upsetting and disturbing, but that real sex isn't like that.

The age-verification plan will not work. It will do nothing to reduce the availability of porn on the internet to anyone who wants to see it.
It works for gambling sites because you pay to gamble so you are already giving them your credit card or bank details.

Of course it can work. People can still he required to give credit card details to watch, just with no charge.

Personally I'd prefer an outright ban on violent porn. The actors are consenting to assault, something that's not legally possible.

Janice Turner in the Times today:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/porn-is-warping-the-minds-of-a-generation-hcdbqhmq8?shareToken=6580d52a19ab2de648b5b126de4e4bdb

Feminists have written a lot about the link between porn watching and men who rape. Catherine Mackinnon wrote a lot about this

Parity would be a good start.

But instead:
"From each, says the slogan, according to her ability; to each according to his needs."

there are a lot of really good points raised by people on this thread, around the issues involved in this and each case is different there is a national team set up to look into the effects of especially online pornography and its infulance on HSB and this clearly does present a significant factor in these cases. Though often the biggest factor is complex trauma from an early age or the impact of abuse. As people have highlighted the vast number of cases involve boys in a variety of ways both assailants and victims and the impact caused on family's and young People effects on both sides is difficult to fully recover from. sadly numbers are increasing but are thankfully still very small and young people that present warning signs at an early age are being picked up better though more needs to be done. Young people don't come to do these things on there own they are infulanced by the world they live in, far more needs to be done to help young people who are at risk of commiting such behaviours.

Frissen the software you are using will reduce the chances of a young child coming across something inappropriate, it will do nothing to prevent a teenager from seeing pornography. It will do nothing to prepare them for things they might end up seeing. It will do nothing to prevent another child or adult showing them something.

The age-verification plan will not work. It will do nothing to reduce the availability of porn on the internet to anyone who wants to see it.
It works for gambling sites because you pay to gamble so you are already giving them your credit card or bank details.
There really isn't an easy solution to prevent teenagers from viewing pornography. For younger children, it's really down to parental supervision. Parents need to use that time to teach children appropriate internet use and talk to them about pornography and consent.

This is not just "child on child assaults", it is not just "kids" being "a risk to other kids".
This is mainly MVAWG. Male Violence Against Women and GIrls.

Please stop trying to spin this as "girls to it too". No, they don't - nowhere near to such extremes.

I'm also interested as at first you said girls watching porn led them to abuse other children, now it's girls who have been sexually abused. Why the change. I'd think if anything, seeing mainstream het porn would set girls nicely up for abuse. That's probably another conversation though.

You've answered your own question, these things are linked. Watching extreme porn as a young person is a form of sexual abuse, even if it happens to be a passive one by society. Sexual abuse of kids makes them a risk to other kids and also puts them at risk themselves.

I've never heard anyone talk about this outside of MN. It was my first thought when I heard about the whole idea of the blockers. I find it a bizarre gap, do people not realise the changes in the brain that teens go through?

This was my first question when I heard about it, does it also delay brain maturation. Because if so that is a big deal in a few different ways. But I have never heard it discussed outside of specialised instances like this. It took me a while to even find out the answer to the question because it was so ignored.

You say you have no problem with this as girls do it too.

Not every article has to be about men's sexual violence. It's not some kind of attack on women that the author of the article is concerned about the effect of porn on kids generally. No one who reads that article is going to conclude that somehow girls are as likely to commit sexual violence as boys, given that all the examples mentioned are are of boys.

I'd also point out that sexual exploitation of a child by another child isn't always violent and the instances I mentioned are quite likely to be of the latter kind. I have doubts that there are even stats collected that would be relevant which might be something to think about before demanding statistics. Not everything that is true can be proven statistically.

I'm not sure what your problem is. It's a bleedin' headline, one that is accurate and tells what the article is concerned with, and its a good article. Which is more than you can say about a lot of them. Maybe you'd like something different, I don't think it matters, but it's a minor point either way. Not worth being confrontational about.

Yes it happens

However sexual violence is overwhelmingly committed by males whatever the age is.

OP early on agreed with another poster that the piece in question obscures that this is mainly boys doing the abusing, by saying child on child.

You say you have no problem with this as girls do it too.

So, let's see the stats.

Nothing to do with point scoring.

I'm also interested as at first you said girls watching porn led them to abuse other children, now it's girls who have been sexually abused. Why the change.

I'd think if anything, seeing mainstream het porn would set girls nicely up for abuse. That's probably another conversation though.

To clarify, above, I know from social workers that young girls who have been abused sometimes try and reenact that abuse on other children.

Let's have your stats for the epidemic of female led sexual violence is schools then goosefoot, tia

Seems like something of a non-sequiter. What's your point?

I know of publicised cases of instances where girls abused younger girls, and I know from social workers such things happen sometimes with children who have been abused. Porn and inappropriate exposure of girl children to sexual content can affect them and its a concern to protect them from that. I don't need stats to prove that somehow.

You might try discussing things like an adult instead of trying to score points.