When it comes to Internet safety, kids seem to know more than their parents. According to a London (UK) School of Economics study, only 16% of parents believe that their kids have seen porn on the web, when in all actuality, 57% of the kids say they’ve seen at least some porn, usually by accident. How parents can still be in the dark about this is a mystery, especially with all the press the issue receives. Read More.
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Parents are still clueless
I occasionally teach internet awareness to families and I am amazed by how little the parents know about what their kids are doing. I often let the kids do much of the talking – tell about their favourite sites, of how often they reach “questionable” sites,etc. It teaches me, and it teaches their parents. It also, I hope, starts them talking so that the dialogue continues when they get home.
Clueless Parents
We often hear that parents should control the chidren’s INTERNET use and filtering is not a public responsibility. If parents are clueless then how can they be expected to curb their children’s tastes for pornography. Filtering is actually a professional resposibility because parents are not always aware of the ramifications of unrestricted information use for children.
Re:Clueless Parents
Any “child” old enough to have “tastes for pornography” is not a child. Young adults are interested in sexuality, not children.
The problem with your philosophy, Eli, is that filter advocates do not properly define what constitutes a child (childhood ends at the onset of puberty, not some arbitrarily assigned number of years), or what constitutes pornography. A great deal of what is called porn is simply artistic, or is sexuality health-based information. And all too often it is simply material that is an accurate reflection of reality.
Re:Clueless Parents
“Young adults are interested in sexuality, not children.”
LOL! I don’t know if you have kids, but you’ve got a lot to learn about children and sex. Prettying it up (adult attraction for 8-12 year olds whose bodies are going through hormonal changes but whose minds haven’t matured) with “artistic” nonsense and blather doesn’t change reality.
Columbus Dispatch this week ran a story on child sex offenders/aggressors–i.e., children who were sexually abusing other children.
Re:Clueless Parents
I know enough about children to treat them with respect for their human dignity instead of treating them as if they were stupid chattels. The specious rationales used by the thought police in Canada and the U.S. are the same as those used to deny women the right to vote and to deny slaves their freedom.
I know that all the fearful proclamations of the ultra-self-righteous are merely projectings of their own shadows.
I know that children naturally seek out information that is appropriate to their individual emotional and intellectual development as a function of their innate curiosity; including information about sex.
I know that sexual awareness starts with “Where do babies come from” and that being sexually curious is not the same as being sexually active.
I also know what self-fulfilling prophecies are and how to spot one:
If the minds of children have not matured, it is because the political and religious right-wing has created conditions in which those minds cannot mature. When the mistreated children grow up to be immature adults, the right-wing then proclaims sanctimoniously: See! We were right!
The primary self-fulling prophecy in the U.S. today is Abstinence-only Ignorance. The ultra-conservatives are bitching and moaning about teenage pregnancy, Abstinence-only Ignorance is creating conditions in which the rate of teen pregnancies will sky-rocket, and the ultra-conservatives will use that increase to justify further Abstinence-only Ignorance.
By children you mean the pre-pubescent, don’t you? Or do you actually mean legal minors, including those who are 17 years 364 days in age?
And what, exactly, were these so-called children doing? Playing “Doctor” and “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine”? Or trying to seduce each other at high school dances?
People are sexual creatures, and natural expressions of that sexuality does not in fact constitute sexual harrassment or abuse just because some up-tight ultra-conservative says so.
Is this the kind of sexual abuse they were talking about?
Breast-feeding as sexual abuse. Yeah, there are perverts in the U.S. alright, but most of them are of the “We Must Protect The Children” variety of lunatic. Here’s another case which is equally stupid even if it is legally valid.
So, this young adult, who is of the age of consent in some jurisdictions, takes self-portraits and thereby sexually molests herself. This is part of what makes American anti-sexuality jurisprudence so abjectly stupid. She could go out and screw the high school football team en masse, but taking photographs of her own body to show the members of that team makes her a child molester.
Pfah!