Porn, why is nothing being done???

[Sews230]

Good afternoon peeps, those of you who are concerned about your children seeing porn might have heard that last November the government banned a big list of sex acts that could be shown in UK Porn:
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-porn-legislation-what-is-now-banned-under-new-government-laws-9898541.html

Great, you might think, it's a start you might think, unfortunately you'd be wrong, the UK Porn industry is tiny and to view any of its content you have to pass an age verification process and have a credit card, not something that most children can do and why would they even try? If they really want to look at porn all they need to do is go to free "Tube" sites that have all the hardcore porn you really don't want to imagine, for free!!

I've been talking to a few computer geeks (an affectionate term) on my course and they tell me that nobody pays for porn anymore, all the porn people want is free and extremely easy to find, all the sex acts now banned in UK porn are there and more, rape, forced sex, choking, school girls, revenge porn etc, all on tube sites like Xhamster, youporn, pornhub, porn-spider (don't look at them unless you are made of really steely stuff, those sites are really repulsive).

What the government has done with these laws is like banning cigarettes whilst letting people stand on street corners giving them away for free, it makes no sense, when are they going to do something about the free sites??? Articles like this scare the bejesus out of me, what are these sites doing to our society, our children etc, I shudder when I think about my two looking at this stuff... www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/most-young-people-agree-that-porn-creates-unrealistic-views-of-sex--but-they-still-admit-watching-it-9679160.html

www.independent.co.uk/news/people/anne-robinson-watches-porn-for-the-first-time-he-could-really-be-pounding-some-pastry-10180656.html?icn=puff-3

In my opinion the government need to ban these sites, block them from entering this country (they are all from oversees) force the ISP's (internet service providers) to block people from seeing them, you might have heard recently that various illegal download sites (for films and music) like Piratebay have been banned in this country (following lobbying from big business), and while there are ways of getting around these blocks, what I'm told these bans do is make going to these sites a hell of a lot more difficult, and if you don't have the computer know-how you simply can't visit them anymore.

Now I know that this government is always keen to help big business but this is a more important issue than film and music copyright, this is about our children/nation being corrupted, children thinking that the attitudes displayed in porn are the norm, I heard on the new a few weeks back that it's common place for children as young as ten to send naked pictures to each other before they start dating, sickening, how has it been allowed to get this bad???

I'm new to this site but have heard in the past that it carries political clout, is there a way that I could start a petition to try and get something done about this issue?

Thank you for listening...

Right because you know rape only exists on porn sites

I do support a child being taught about rape. I don't think they need to know all the details but I would rather a child knows rape is wrong and report it than a child believe their abuser and believe it is normal, that is how love is shown etc.

Look I get why you think these sites should be more heavily controlled, I get it. I just think that it is just extremely difficult to control. Just as downloading music illegally is. So based on that, I think there should be more education and that is key.

Sews girls of 11 were in danger in the 60s and 70s (as recent celeb cases reveal)... less than a century before that they could be married off to old pervs. In the name of respectable life.
Believe it or not the talking is a good thing.

Sews did you actually read that article?

And don't tell me what I "should" be doing based on ill informed hysteria.
The NSPCC aren't my colleagues or employers.

According to various MPS we "should" be withdrawing sex education, gay teachers should hide their sexuality etc.
"Should" is a very mis used word by people swayed by or courting the knee jerk press, with little understanding of the issues.

I do work with teenagers and CP/safe Internet behaviour is part of my job. Your belief I'm doing it wrong says more about your lack of understanding about how the experts do it nowadays than mine (almost like someone saying "if you were a midwife you'd know pregnant ladies can't eat peanuts" to a hcp).

squizita The don't go off with strange men lesson is different to telling 11 years olds that it's wrong to gang rape their classmates, whether we've gone too far or there's still hope for us to get things back I find it so sad that innocence has bee lost like this...

It wasn't stranger danger. It was other teenagers, it was professionals etc.
You really do seem underinformed about this even by the standards of the most "daily mail shock Facebook story" parent. I'm sorry - you are the naive one here.
You are terrified of things that are unlikely to happen and so advice is likely to focus on the wrong/extreme things rather than more common risks such as "sexting". Your solutions are directly at odds with what schools and youth services are likely to do. You back up what you say with articles which agree with what everyone else here is saying, not you suggesting a quick angry Google search and a skim read at best of the most shocking sounding article you could find ... a teenager after a dirty website could run rings round you. Sorry, but that's the truth.

Yes I think some people are so keen to protect the civil liberties of adults that a major child protection issue is getting heinously overlooked.

We are going to look back at this time and ask ourselves how we allowed our children to be exposed to such risks.

The harm caused will last decades.

There is a famous MN post, by empusa (the 'unicorn' post) which explains why there is no magic bullet techy solution. To porn but also true of anything else.

What remains is good communication, and use of device based filters (already available). And steps like not letting young children online unsupervised. Because by the time they are teens, they will out-geek you. And if they want to view it, they will. If they haven't learned not to be a bully, they might become one. If not at home, then out and about. And it might not be porn - it might be eating disorders, or radicalisation, or cults, or whatever.

So the only real defence is education - same for drugs and RL safe sex etc. The Government can't make it all go away.

Scaevola YY x 100.

name not sure what your point about raspberry pis are. They can't download porn by themselves.

Of course they can. They're fully-featured Linux machines. I use one as a portable desktop. Web browser and everything. What makes you think otherwise?

Thank you Jackie, agreed.

squizita What schools and youth services are doing now isn't working, that article proves it no?

HowardTJMoon Nice try but I'm not biting...

I couldn't give a flowery fart if you "bite" or not. What I do want you to do is to think a bit more deeply about what it is you actually want, why you want it, and what message your attempts to achieve give to society at large about your parenting choices and priorities.

You are responsible for parenting your children, not the government.

Namechange I think the point noble is making is computers don't download porn themselves, someone needs to type in a url to get to a site to look at the porn.

Sews what schools do is working, they can only control the part of their network they are responsible for, they are not responsible for children sending images via their email to other children, they are not responsible for sending pics/messages through mobile devices via messaging or picture apps. They are not responsible for a load of other stuff either.

Parents are the people who are responsible for what their kids do on their phone/laptop whatever.

Thing is technology isn't that clever, it's not really designed to be, you can't block anything on the Internet, it's impossible, there will always be a way around or a back door in. If you don't know how to do something it's not difficult, google it, and all the instructions to tell you what you want to do are there is black and white and no doubt there will be 100videos showing you what you want to do step by step.

As someone else has mentioned your arguments are weak and you are uninformed.

No, the article doesn't prove that at all. It highlights a problem and what is being done to solve it. As kids only spend 7 hours or so a day at school, even a perfect system in school would fail if parents failed to parent properly. Of course with the option of blaming schools for their lack of skills during the remaining 17 hours ...
The only school proven not to be working would be the one which taught you comprehension and how to write an argument/use factual evidence cohesively.

This threads very informative on where and how to access multiple porn sites all in one place. I didn't have a clue but now have step by step instructions.
An irony in there somewhere I recon

Can anyone explain to me (helping me to be more informed) why the government has banned those certain acts in UK Porn under the banner of child protection?

"In a converging media world these provisions must be coherent, and the BBFC classification regime is a tried and tested system of what content is regarded as harmful for minors."

Where is the quote above from - we may then be able to answer

There has always been porn and the latest technology has always been able to show it.
If you monitor your children's internet use, why would it be a problem.
Mine didn't see it because they didn't have the devices and were supervised online.
it's stupid arguing that some magical thing will stop its existence, it wont.
But you make sure your own kids don't get unsupervised access, that is probably the easiest solution to the problem.

"I make sure my kids don't see porn" is just sticking your head in the sand about all the kids who do see it. And potentially show it to your kid on their device.

they pirate porn that has been produced to be sold therefore the porn producers are losing lots of money, after all why would a porn watcher pay for porn when they can easily get it for free.
A lot of pay sites use free pornhub type sites as advertising. They'll upload a short video, or part of one, and then show a message saying 'if you want more, go to [xxxpaysite.com]'. Obviously it works for them, or they wouldn't be doing it. Not to mention the advertising revenue those sites generate, which the originators of the videos probably get a percentage of (the same way it works on YouTube, I believe). Nobody is losing money on these free sites, sorry.

And potentially show it to your kid on their device.

Which is a completely insoluble problem. Merely saying that you want a solution is not a solution. To do it at the network level would effectively involve the UK disconnecting from the Internet, and probably from the global phone network, and all technology companies relocating out of the UK. It would involve UK residents being unable to make online purchases, do online banking and (in particular) do any form of home working. It would involve tourists visiting the UK being unable to contact their home countries. It would require state pre-authorisation of every image, video and other upload, and probably involve regulation of all photo sharing and publication services. It would require content filtering and regulation on a scale to make the (ineffective) Great Firewall of China look like a quick lash-up in the lab. It would make the UK an international laughing stock, and reduce our economy to the stone-age: we could, of course, completely forget about any sort of financial services industry which (I gather) provides some small amount of income to London. It would make illegal the use of Amazon EC2 (etc), Microsoft Azure (etc) and any and all other cloud services, if you could access them in the first place which is unlikely.

To do it at the device level would involve the UK ceasing to have any sort of software industry, as it would make compilers, debuggers and other development tools illegal. It would require the UK to cease to import software and hardware from other countries, and would require border controls to ensure no visitor to the UK (if someone were stupid enough to do that) to be carrying a mobile phone, laptop, tablet, memory stick or other computing device. The postal system would have to be heavily regulated to prevent and CD, memory stick or other device containing software entering the country.

If you want to look silly and "send a message" by setting up utterly ineffective systems to give the naive a false sense of security, knock yourself out. But without disconnecting the UK from the Internet anyone with a computer and 10 quid on their pre-pay debit card can bypass anything you put in place, and I would be horrified if a reasonably smart Y10 computer studies student couldn't do it in a morning.

Namechange I think the point noble is making is computers don't download porn themselves, someone needs to type in a url to get to a site to look at the porn.

No, they were proposing mandating a "child mode" on every computing device sold in the UK. Leaving aside the issue of how the computer knows it's a child sat in front of it, that means that no device whose operating system is easily modifiable could be sold, nor any device where the child can access the admin mode. If I had a fiver for every parent who told me that (a) they had installed parental controls on all the devices in the house so of course little Johnny couldn't see porn and (b) that they'd bought little Johnny a Raspberry Pi because it's so interesting and writing apps is the future, I'd have, oh, twenty quid. Pis run web browsers. Pis can run in-house proxies. Pis can run VPN servers and clients. Pis can do all sorts of things to circumvent "parental controls", and little Johnny has the root password and physical access to the storage. Even if they don't, it is absolutely trivial to break into a Raspberry Pi to which you don't have the admin password (indeed, in most cases it's absolutely trivial to break into any computer to which you don't have the admin password, but it's particularly easy on Pis).

It's trivial to by-pass "parental controls", whether network level or device level. Chiltern Trains' wifi has a really annoying blocking feature which means you can't access several politics blogs from their trains. It takes me, literally, two seconds to bypass, and I have a choice of three or four methods to do it.

NinjaLeprechaun Sorry but you really haven't got a clue what you're talking about where did you get this info?
You're guessing the facts, legal porn sites using Tube sites to advertise are just making the best of a bad situation, what choice have they got, they have to adapt or die, they don't get any of the advertising revenue from the Tube site, and any traffic/subscriptions that come from a Tube site link, the Tube site takes 60% of that sign up fee, great deal hey...

caroldecker It comes from the first link in my original post, here you go:

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-porn-legislation-what-is-now-banned-under-new-government-laws-9898541.html

Why isn't more being done?

Because porn is the cornerstone of patriarchal power?
In other words, porn is necessary for the status quo to continue and girls need to be groomed as teens into believing it's acceptable and normal.

Without porn the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down and it will be harder to treat women as second class citizens who are "only here for one thing".

So don't expect much government help with this one, seeing as doctors politicians and other men in power have a keep interest in making sure the porn industry continues, not least because most of them are watching porn themselves.

sakura You could have a point there, the government trying to kill the UK Pron industry whilst doing nothing about the real issue - the free Tube sites, looks like they want to be seen to be doing something as oppose to really making a difference...