Afternoon, everyone. Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. We've talked about it at length here.
While broadly we agree that terms such as 'child pornography' are pretty unacceptable, we aren't sure that we can totally outlaw it at this stage. It seems like the world has a lot of catching up to do still where this is concerned so it doesn't quite make the grade for our proscribed list, which is actually very small indeed.
Where we would expect any right-thinking member of society to know that the n-word, for example, is not something that is acceptable to use anywhere, we think perhaps not nearly so many people understand why the terms discussed here are unacceptable just yet. To simply delete every use of them or even replace them, we suspect won't help with any understanding of that.
We think what may work is if, whenever a term like this is spotted, other posters explained why use of these terms is offensive to victims of CSA, and which terms should be used instead, that might actually make a difference. Historically we have found that posters tend to be more amenable to having an issue like this explained to them by another Mumsnetter and it usually seems to have a greater effect than simply being deleted by MNHQ. A deletion is not always seen and is often simply viewed as 'a slap on the wrist for rule-breaking', and we would rather posters moved on with some understanding of the problem than simply felt 'told off'.
We have seen exactly this in action on this thread, where several posters have left with an understanding of an issue they hadn't previously seen and knowing which terms to use in future - and hopefully they will pass that knowledge on to others as well.
We're not ruling out 'banning' these terms at a later date - we just think that we need to first get to a point where the majority of people understand the problem with it first.