AUDIO
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Phillip Jensen speaks on Anger as part of a series on emotions in the Christian life, delivered at the Australia Day Convention 2010
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Is your child searching for porn?
According to Symantec (note: they produce internet filtering software), the top 5 search terms for children seven years of age and under are:
- YouTube
- Porn
- Club Penguin (a Disney site for children)
Children aren’t accidentally stumbling across these sites whilst searching for something else. They are searching for porn. Typing ‘porn’ into their browsers - a web search I don’t recommend anyone does, let alone children under 7.
Are your children doing this? I hope not, but these are awful statistics.
Even YouTube isn’t an edifying place for children (or in many respects, for adults), with one report revealing that YouTube returns 330,000 results for ‘porn’. The report explains (and this is obvious to those who have used YouTube) that soft-core pornography is common-place throughout the site, not to mention the advertisements (subtle and not so subtle) for adult sites and sexually explicit concepts.
Some questions come to mind in the face of these statistics:
- Why are children searching for ‘porn’?
- What is your family doing to protect your children from being exposed to this content? Monitoring computer usage, not allowing kids to have computers in their own rooms, and using filters like this and this are a good start.
- What is your church doing to help families in your community to protect their children from being exposed this content? One idea is for churches to host community seminars like this.
- What are we, as Christians, doing to protect children in our nation from being exposed to this content? Sure, I understand the challenges of implementing a nation-wide filter, but is there anything else we can be doing to actively reject this evil?
- What will be the long-term consequences for a society whose children have been exposed to porn from such a young age?
As has been mentioned on this site and elsewhere before, porn is an epidemic in the adult world too, even among Christians.
In March, Outreach Media will be running an awareness campaign to promote this problem, and importantly, Jesus as the solution. This campaign will be coupled with resources for churches, and an information seminar. The seminar will include Bible teaching, plus insights from a Christian psychologist experienced in treating people suffering from pornography addition. An information kit will be available for download at the Outreach Media website in early February so any church will be able to run their own seminar.
Here is a blog by Liam Berriman questioning the data.
That said Steve, I think this is important topic and may be a wake up call to parental complacency.
Mind you I can see what my kids have been searching for simply by using the "history" tool in Firefox. My kids aren't as sophisticated as some :)
I have to agree with you on many of your points, and it's an extremely important one for anyone who's to be discerning. God gave us the gift of intellect for a reason, unfortunately few of us ever us it. Instead we react and join the mob in its running around, screaming the "Sky is falling!" or "Burn the witches!"
Part of having trusting in God is that He knows what's going on and is in control, so we can step back and ask: Who wrote this, and what are they selling? We can then weigh up what is being said and come to a better decision. Thus as Christians we can offer the world that peaceful voice of reason rather than throwing more petrol on the fire.
Geoff, what voice of reason do you think Christians can add to this debate?
There's a very well written book by Pamela Paul, "Pornified". which takes a non-sensationalised look at the topic. In a chapter entitled "Porn is cool" it outlines how one girl as young as 11 -- yes 11 -- made her own porn pages. This concerns me and I'm not even a parent.
It seems that the best solution is what parents have done in years past, take a healthy interest in their children's lives while at the same time giving them the freedom they need to grow into individual people.
In Him,
Geoff
I was responding in 2 parts, the 1st in the context of general discernment, and asking the "who, what, when, where, why, how" questions of most things we read in the media rather than join the mob. The media love sensationalism, and companies have a "sell message".
I hope that my 2nd part answered your question, as the best solution is for parents to have healthy involvement in their kids lives. Where one can use events that come as teaching opportunities. This skills the children in how to live smart lives, and in the case of X'n families X'n lives. Wrapping them in cotton wool will deprive them of the much needed skills they'll need to survive in the world. Jesus reminds us to be as innocent as doves, yet as shrewd as serpents. Living skills won't just happen in a vacuum, that somehow upon the age of 18 we suddenly know how to live.
That said, when it comes to porn and society, we need to go beyond being moralising wowsers. Instead we as X'ns need to engage with our interlocutors, on the human level. Be a human to them, love them and accept them as they are. Do you like being shamed too?
Only then we can challenge the assumption that porn is harmless entertainment. Help them to see that there are very real consequences, along a spectrum of: harm to the "actors", skewed ideas of what is normal/healthy sexual practice, social isolation, the pressure on women to look like porn queens, marital failure, even up to criminal behaviour.
Because children have a knack of networking with their friends and relatives to find out what the most taboo subjects are. Often younger children are introduced to these subjects by their older siblings without actively looking for them themselves.
"2.What is your family doing to protect your children from being exposed to this content? Monitoring computer usage, not allowing kids to have computers in their own rooms, and using filters like this and this are a good start."
Covenant Eyes accountability and filtering software is the solution to this problem.
"3.What is your church doing to help families in your community to protect their children from being exposed this content? One idea is for churches to host community seminars like this."
Somebody needs to post detailed but concise instructions online on how to lock down any given computer using Covenant Eyes accountability and filtering software. Moore College would be ideally positioned to do this given its extensive experience in implementing Covenant Eyes software at the college.
Continued...
Christians will have the greatest success in protecting non-Christian children from the hazards of pornography by getting their own house in order and using their extensive influence in the media to continually make widely known the benefits of using Covenant Eyes accountability and filtering software. Non-Christians greatly resent being told what to do but will respond positively to the influence of Christians setting a good example.
"5.What will be the long-term consequences for a society whose children have been exposed to porn from such a young age?"
The long-term consequences are horrendous, however it does not even take a long time for these consequences to manifest themselves. It takes 10 to 15 years and those consequences are already here:
> Increased incidences of rape. Though this is not a representative example, 30% of women in the US military have been raped. Google it.
> Increased incidences of violence. Increased violence always follows increased sexual immorality for reasons which are beyond my level of expertise.
> Increased dysfunction in personal relationships to the extent that people decrease meaningful interaction between themselves.
> Increased abortion,
Continued...
> Increased breakdown of society because people are not focussing on fixing problems that reduce the common good. Rather they are focussing on their formidable scars from exposure to pornography from a young age.
We are there already, however it would only take about 18 months of concerted media exposure involving the Covenant Eyes accountability and filtering software solution to make a significant impact for good upon this massive problem.
Once I started telling people (beleivers and non-believers) about this there was hardly a parent I came across who didn't have a similar story.