Online pornography use is a problem and it’s a problem in the Church.
Does a majority of us need to stop indulging in it? Yes.
But I am afraid that our battle against pornography turns a tad bit short sided as so much focus is placed on ourselves as we say:
I must stop using pornography, it destroys my relationships and it distorts my view of reality.
As much as the fight against pornography seems to be mano a mano, we are fighting a war that effects us all. Just because this sin stalks us and tries to destroy us individually, doesn’t mean we should be fighting back in the same manner.
Take a recent story from a British tabloid.
A Corroding Childhood
I find it ironic that an anti-pornography story was published on a website full of stories featuring half-butt-naked celebrities in the sidebar, but I’ll save that topic for another time. This story featured a former editor of a UK men’s magazine that was full of “soft porn”:
“With its frequent nudity and lewd photo spreads, I’d long been accused of being a soft pornographer, and after leaving Loaded I agonized that my magazine may have switched a generation onto more explicit online porn.
In the documentary I set out on a journey to answer the question: is porn harmless, or is it damaging lives?
My interest was deeply personal, too, as my own beautiful little boy, Sonny, is now four. Even though he has only just started primary school, the Children’s Commissioner estimates boys as young as ten are now being exposed to online porn.
I wanted to know what I could do to protect my own son from a seemingly inevitable exposure to hardcore material in just a few years’ time.”
What did David Cameron find?
It’s “corroding childhood.”
It’s Not About Me
It turns out that my fight against online pornography isn’t about me at all. It’s about my kids. It’s about the next generation that’s become exposed to “hard core” pornography at an early age:
“I asked the teenagers: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how likely would you say it is that boys and girls your age are watching porn online?’
The reply was a chorus of tens, nines and one eight.
When I asked the children if there were parental controls on the internet at home, they all said no, their parents trusted them. They all admitted their parents had no idea what they were watching, and would be shocked if they did know.”
Whoa.
As my six year old son plays Minecraft in the other room and my teenage daughters use their tablets everyday, I am struck dumbfounded.
Questions run through my head as one underlying truth pounds in my head: “The battle against pornography isn’t something I am waring against for myself, anymore, it’s a fight that spans well beyond myself.”
Here I felt like William Wallace storming the enemy with sword raised high, not thinking about the vast number of lives behind me that are dependent upon my lead to charge the enemy with full force. This isn’t a vendetta against the plague of pornography in my own life, but a fight for my family, a fight for my fellow man, a fight for the future.
As “an entire generation’s sexuality has been hijacked by grotesque online porn,” we need to come up against this with full force.
Look around.
Look to your right and look to your left.
Realize that you’re not in this battle alone.
There’s no use trying to hide it.
Our enemy wants us to think we’re in this battle alone, but we’re not.
There’s you, me and generations behind us that are depending on us to win this war.
It’s not about you, but we can’t win this without you.
Stand up and join the fight.
Susan Carver says
It is very worrying for all parents (or at least it should be!). One of the worst things that could happen though is if there is a knee jerk reaction by people who do not understand the technology and demand that governments step in to stop such things. This could lead to enforced or default censorship by ISPs and little control by parents. Some may think this is the way to go, but there is so much pornography online it would be impossible for humans to manually blacklist them – there would have to be automated system, which is where mistakes happen.
A site which contains educational information on puberty would no doubt contain content some would class as inappropriate for children under 8. Should it be blocked for everyone including 14 year olds, or not? What about teen ‘agony aunt’ type sites which could be incredibly helpful for those children who feel they cannot approach a parent with those types of questions?
The control and monitoring of what children see online is ultimately a parental responsibility. Unfortunately, many parents know a lot less about the Internet than their children which is where they need to seek education. Some don’t even follow basic safety guidelines like only allowing Internet access from devices in public rooms (i.e. not the childrens bedrooms). There are many child safety applications available to help filter out the bad sites, so parents should take advantage of them. For example, an excellent one that was recommended to me by my church recently is called SafeSearchLock (www.safesearchlock.com). It keeps the family filters locked onto maximum for all of the major search engines and sites like Google, Bing, YouTube, Yahoo, Flickr, Dailymotion etc. etc. By stopping the sites appearing in the search engines it stops preview images from showing and the children don’t even know the sites exist. At the very least, parents (and adults for that matter) should have something like that installed.
Eric Dye says
Thank you for your comments, Susan! 🙂