Richard Hogan: Urgent need to address the type of pornography our children have access to
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I have been an advocate for action against pornography sites for many years now.
When I was a child growing up, pornography was a magazine of static images found on a dusty top shelf in a city shop. In the 90s we had — an irreverent look at sexual habits throughout Europe. It was funny and harmless.
Humans have always had an interest in consuming sexual images, such images are etched into the walls of Pompeii.
But pornography has irrevocably changed over the years, and with the arrival of smartphones and endless internet access, it means that hardcore pornography is literally in our children’s pockets.
The type of pornography that our children have access to is something we need to address as a matter of urgency. Pornography today promotes violence against women.
The recent study carried out by The Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute (SERP) makes for very stark reading. But every parent should read it and educate themselves on what our children are being exposed to.
I can’t believe I am going to write this next bit after lobbying for change for so many years but currently there are no barriers to our children accessing hardcore extreme material. Nothing.
I worked in a school a few years ago where a senior infant had viewed very damaging explicit images. It motivated me to set up a petition to bring to government to show them that we want action now to protect our children and prevent our daughters from becoming victims of gender-based sexual violence.
We have far too many incidents in our society of women and girls being attacked. Court reports on such incidents often mention that the perpetrators of sexual-based violence had watched pornography — including extreme violence pornography — regularly.
Being the father of three daughters myself, I must say I worry about all of this modern trend.
Our boys are being fed harmful material telling them that girls like to have consent taken from them, that girls enjoy violence as part of sexual arousal and that they should spit on girls and choke them when they are intimate together.
Why are we letting this happen?
We have far too many cases of sexually motivated violence against women not to take action to prevent our boys from developing pathological ideas about sexual desire. It’s just so obvious, boys who consume extreme hardcore material at a young age have a higher risk of becoming violent towards women and less happy in life as they develop. Surely that should motivate all of us to stop this from happening.
We must protect our boys so that they can explore their sexuality in a healthy and loving way.
In their introduction to their findings, SERP outlined: "The study was attempting to gain a better understanding of how pornography is creating a conducive context for the perpetration of violence against women and girls. This reflects a growing societal consensus that the widespread availability and consumption of mainstream online pornography is fuelling this violence."
These findings must be listened to by our Government. What do they need to hear? How many more families need to be devastated by what has happened to their daughter for them to take action?
The report outlined that sexually violent content is shaping the sexual behaviour of many pornography consumers, both adults and children in Ireland, to the extent that pornography actively distorts or even breaks the boundary between sex and sexual violence. They explain that their critique of pornography is not derived from a position that favours the censorship of erotic material, but rather from the perspective that there is an urgent need to comprehend and address pornography for what it truly is — the ‘sexual violence, torture and degradation’ of real women and girls on film.
I was fortunate to be asked to take part in the study and I posited, like other professionals did, that to be genuinely ‘sex- positive’ is to be ‘porn-critical’ — if our goal as a society is to promote positive, healthy, mutually pleasurable sexual relationships then we must reject the violent, ‘pornified’ version of ‘sex’ that the trade has effectively forced upon us and our children.
1. Violence against women and girls
2. Incest and child sexual abuse
3. Sexual desire of teenagers by adults
4. Image-based sexual abuse
5. Pimping and sex trafficking
How many more reports do we need to read before we start to take action?
How many more terrible cases do we have to see in the news before we take action?
I know it is a trillion dollar industry, but surely protecting our children is more important than money. Surely.