The ease of access by children and teenagers to pornography on the Internet is making headlines again. The furore arose after an Australian Institute survey showed that 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls aged 16 and 17 had been exposed to pornography on the Internet. As a result, the ABA (Australian Broadcasting Association) has come under fire for failing to regulate access to pornography on the Internet.
Currently, ISPs provide filtering software, such as Net Nanny or Internet Sheriff, to allow parents to regulate what their children see on the Net. Unfortunately, these programs too often miss certain sites or end up restricting access to harmless sites, and as a result they're not used.
Another alternative, fuelled by these reports, is to put the responsibility on each ISP to ban pornography sites so they're simply not available as part of a customer's Internet access. If over-18 customers wish to have access to these X-rated sites, they can opt-out of this filtering as part of their service contract.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like a viable solution, as filtering of content will give ISPs added financial pressure as well as a slowdown of Internet access.
I think that finding a better way to filter content from the Internet is missing the point entirely. The issue here is that pornography is being seen by children. And whether it's in a magazine, a video tape, or on the Internet, the thought of a 16 or 17 year old seeing pornography makes us feel uncomfortable.
Let's accept the fact that pornography will exist and that people, even our children, will be able to find it. And what if they find it? Do we even know if early exposure to pornography will have a negative impact on a child? Studies so far seem inconclusive.
However, we are able to educate our children and hopefully provide them with the intelligence they need to make the right decisions about their sexuality and sexual practices -- instead of closing the door and pretending that it doesn't exist. Just like anti-smoking campaigns, at some point your child will be exposed to smoking cigarettes, so all you can hope for is that they make the right decision based on the education given to them.
The creation of the Internet was a defining moment in the continuing development of our society. Let's face the reality that society has changed and that some things we'd rather not see or talk about with our children are much more visible now. Instead of trying to revert back to the way things were, we need to deal with the way things are now, to give our kids the best chance possible of making sense of the world in which they live.