Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697634002057.pdf (Australia)
HARM BEING DONE TO AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN THROUGH ACCESS TO PORNOGRAPHY ON THE INTERNET Committee Secretary Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 ec.sen@aph.gov.au Requested Guidelines: Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the Internet, with particular reference to: a. trends of online consumption of pornography by children and their impact on the development of healthy and respectful relationships; b. current methods taken towards harm minimisation in other jurisdictions, and the effectiveness of those methods; c. the identification of any measures with the potential for implementation in Australia; and d. any other related matters Submission: I currently perform I.T.
support services and associated tasks through my own business.

It is through this role and my other role – Father of four children, that I routinely have opportunity to discuss the reference topics and the dangers of pornography with parents and other stake holders.

I have run seminars on internet safety for children and a major component of the seminar is dealing with exposure to pornography.

a.
a.

There are many studies outlining the overall increased access to pornography and at a progressively younger age but my family structure allows for a personal insight into the trend.

My oldest child is a boy (17 this year) and my youngest is also a boy (currently 7yrs old).

This almost 10 year age gap has allowed me to view the ever increasing role technology has played in the development (or in some cases miss-development) of my children.
The trend of increased consumption of technology by the youngest as opposed to his elder brother at the same age is one of my constant struggles.

How to best deal with this is the topic of many conversations between me and my wife.

Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the InternetSubmission 62 The increased ease of access also leads to an increasing concern over access to harmful pornography.
Much of the ability to monitor and protect was locked into the home environment with my oldest but now my youngest is able to access the internet on his friend’s phone as they play after school; completely outside my ability to monitor or protect.

This trend is only set to increase as the school moves to electronic text books etc.

With increased discussion in the media about sexual topics my children seem exposed to concepts at a progressively younger and younger age.
This increased exposure coupled with the internet as a tool for obtaining knowledge is worrying to say the least.

With my older children they used to come to us (parents) first with questions – but now we are often being skipped as the first source in favour of an internet search - also worrying.

b.

Feedback provided to me by parents is one of generally being overwhelmed by the whole topic and their method of dealing with the issue seems to fall into two camps of reactions: 1.
A head-in-sand approach and hope for the best.

2.

Overly restrictive and a complete denial of anything technology based.
At a young age the methods to minimise harm are usually fairly straight forward – but the conversation seems to be difficult for many parents who are not computer savvy and fail to recognise many of the dangers to exposure, limiting the protection only to the home computer not realizing a large potential for harm is located in the myriad of other devices in the home: ipods, tablets, phones, gaming consoles, etc.
As our children get older the options for protection become harder as monitoring and protection abilities are restricted as they have the ability to more avenues of exposure: on the bus, a friend using their phone, at a friend’s house with no protections in place, social media, gaming etc.

c. No comment d. Usually when discussing topics of this nature it is always a suggestion that more education is required.

In this case that could actually compound the problem, if directed at the wrong target audience.
If children are the target for increased education on the harms of pornography – in my experience it gives the topic a larger focus and leads to increased activity in the area not less.

The education needs to be geared towards those that have the greatest influence in this area with the pornography exposure like a virus we need immunization shots given to the gatekeepers of our children – the care givers (parents).
Parents feel overwhelmed and like a worn out immune system the kids are then at greater danger to the harms of increased exposure.

The kids are naturally curious about the topics that pornography deals with – educating them seems counter-intuitive – but indeed the parents could do with some alarm bells and some solid solutions that are easy to implement.

Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the InternetSubmission 62