Anglican Mainstream

By Rita Diller, LifeSite News

When I walked into this year’s Oregon Adolescent Sexuality Conference in Seaside, Oregon, one of the first things I encountered was a table manned by three young teen boys. On the table was a collage that included many depictions of totally bare female genitalia—obviously pornographic and, one would think, illegal.

By Sima Kotecha, BBC News

From The Guardian

Secondary school pupils should learn more about pornography and relationships, sexuality and staying safe, say inspectors

Many schools are failing to give pupils adequate sex and relationships lessons, which could leave them open to sexual exploitation or inappropriate behaviour, inspectors have warned.

Secondary school pupils should learn more about pornography, relationships, sexuality and staying safe, rather than just the "mechanics" of reproduction, Ofsted said.

It also criticised primary schools for spending too much time teaching pupils about friendships and relationships, leaving them ill-prepared for puberty.

In a damning report, the schools watchdog said that in a sizeable proportion of England's schools personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education was still not good enough.

Sex and relationships education needs to be improved in more than a third of schools, Ofsted said.

"In primary schools this was because too much emphasis was placed on friendships and relationships, leaving pupils ill-prepared for physical and emotional changes during puberty, which many begin to experience before they reach secondary school," the report argues.

"In secondary schools it was because too much emphasis was placed on 'the mechanics' of reproduction and too little on relationships, sexuality, the influence of pornography on students' understanding of healthy sexual relationships, dealing with emotions and staying safe."

Read here

By Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

A group of sex education ‘experts’ has suggested that pupils should be taught in school about pornography, on the grounds that it is not ‘all bad’ and can even be ‘helpful’ to them.

Yes, you read that right.

The Sex Education Forum says in a new publication for schools that pornography should be taught in terms of ‘media literacy and representation, gender, sexual behaviour and body image’.

Behind the gobbledegook, this seems to be at least in part a confused attempt to deal with the fact that children are now accessing all manner of dubious or harmful material on the internet.

Accordingly, this publication warns that the sex and bodies in pornography ‘are mostly unrealistic’, and that such material may involve coercing participants into performing sex acts. But it also suggests showing such images to children at age 14. Moreover, it states they might find some of the positions in such porn films ‘helpful’, while being made aware that ‘the so-called pleasure’ they see ‘may be anything but’.

So schoolchildren are to be taught sexual positions from pornography — with a pious health warning that they may not get much pleasure out of them! Pinch yourself — we’re talking 14-year-olds here. Whatever happened to childhood innocence? Whatever happened to teaching?

The Forum says that this approach will equip children with ‘filters in their head’ to apply to the disturbing or damaging media images available to them.

What an amazing argument, that for children to handle situations that are harmful to them they must be exposed to that harm! What next — teaching them how to smoke a crack pipe?

Read here

By Andrew Levy, Mailonline

Girls as young as 13 are facing pressure to appear in home-made porn movies, teachers warned yesterday.

Young teenagers are also submitting to demands from boys for explicit photos which are often shared among friends and even placed on the internet for millions to view.

A conference was told yesterday how easy access to depraved online content is destroying children’s innocence and changing how they perceive themselves and others.

Delegates warned that lads’ mags, the surge in explicit ‘mummy porn’ novels, exposure to inappropriate movies and the depiction of women in computer games are also contributing to a dramatic moral decline among the young.

The Daily Mail has campaigned for tougher controls on computers to stop children accessing online porn.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ annual conference in Liverpool warned that pornography and other depraved imagery was becoming part of everyday life.

Delegates called for sex education classes to be used to explain to pupils that the behaviour they see online is not normal and the ‘perfect’ bodies they see are usually unattainable.
 
Read here

By Chloe Combi, TES magazine

by Chris Brooke, Mailonline

• Teacher at girls school said desirable body image has become 'extreme'
• Young girls are rated on looks and given scores out of ten by peers, she said
• Policies needed on sexual activity between pupils and sex acts in school

Teenage girls are under growing pressure to look like porn stars because of online pornography, according to a disturbing warning yesterday.

Pupils as young as 13 are being pushed to conform to an ‘extreme’ porn-star aesthetic, it was claimed.

The alarming comments echo concerns raised by MPs, children’s charities and the Daily Mail over the damaging effects of easily accessible web porn.

Helen Porter, a science teacher at an independent girls’ school, said: ‘The desirable body image has become more extreme.

‘They are all trying to have a narrow waist, long, slim legs and big boobs.

‘That’s the desirable thing. Girls and boys are viewing more pornographic images.

‘The boys are seeing these porn stars and saying, “I’d like to have a girlfriend who looks like that”.

‘We need to educate them to realise that, for most people, this is not achievable.’

Mrs Porter called on MPs to tackle the problem of ‘readily available pornography’ seen by children on the internet.

Read here

Read also:  Nearly 1.5million adults have stumbled across child pornography when browsing the Internet

 

by John Jalsevac, LifeSite News

An expert on sexual ethics and pornography has used a disturbing new report out of the UK to describe how the culture of easy access to pornography and sexual promiscuity is destroying a generation of young people.

“The offending children are ordinarily not aiming to do harm but rather to act ‘grown up’ as they practice the fascinating, toxic stimuli adult society has coldheartedly loosed into their developmental environment," Dr. Reisman said.

by Albert Mohler

The moral effects of pornography are, by now, well attested. The scourge of pornography has brought ruin and harm into the lives of millions of our friends and neighbors, destroying marriages, distorting sexuality, and poisoning minds. Even so, the pornography industrial complex continues to grow, representing one of the most lucrative segments of the Internet economy.

By Daniel Martin, Mailonline

• Lib Dem peer warns that young women and girls are the 'main casualties' of an 'epidemic' of violent material found online
• NSPCC found more than 5,000 under-18s have been questioned by the police over sex offences over the past three years

Former children’s TV presenter Floella Benjamin has warned of an ‘epidemic’ of violent online porn, which is leading youngsters on a ‘seemingly unstoppable march into a moral wasteland’.

Baroness Benjamin – who sits as a Lib Dem peer in the Lords – said girls were becoming increasingly sexualised while more and more boys were treating them as little more than ‘sexual objects’.

In an impassioned speech to mark today’s International Women’s Day, she said boys were pressurising girls into degrading behaviour.

‘I believe we have opened a Pandora’s box and I have no answer as to how we can reverse the trend of the sexual objectification of women and how to protect our children against its influence,’ she said.

The former Play School and Play Away presenter said violent pornography was ‘only a mouse click away’ and was a ‘pan-global epidemic’.

Too many children were growing up believing happiness could be gained purely by using sex as a commodity, she warned.

Read here

by Albert Mohler, LifeSite News

The moral effects of pornography are, by now, well attested. The scourge of pornography has brought ruin and harm into the lives of millions of our friends and neighbors, destroying marriages, distorting sexuality, and poisoning minds. Even so, the pornography industrial complex continues to grow, representing one of the most lucrative segments of the Internet economy.

For the most part, previous research into the effects of pornography has focused on the psychological and physiological effects of pornography exposure. Among males, exposure to pornography is associated with addictive behaviors traced to the release of chemicals in the brain, stimulating arousal and excitement. In the larger context, pornography is also associated with an exaggerated masculinity, negative attitudes toward women, and relational breakdowns due to unrealistic sexual expectations.
 
Pornography reduces women to objects of sexual attraction and the endless permutations of sexual behaviors available on the Internet are evidence of the insatiable desire for innovation and excitement that pornography produces. This, to a large extent, is what makes pornography such an expansive industry. Its product builds an apparently insatiable appetite for more, and then even more.

More recently, research has emerged that points to another effect of pornography exposure — it warps the worldview of the viewer.

Read here

Read also:  Porn turned thousands of British children into sex offenders, report says by Ben Johnson, LifeSite News

By Gillan Scott, God and Politics in the UK

By Cole Moreton, Telegraph

The death of 13-year-old Chevonea Kendall-Bryan has driven the debate on the sexualisation of the young to fever pitch, but what will we do about it?

There is a storm coming. I can feel it as I stand on a street corner in south London, thinking about my daughters. Lily and Rose are both 11 years old. One is crazy about dogs, the other loves owls.

They are at that tender age when the hormones have begun to stir, and they could be stomping around the room like furious teenagers one minute but snuggling up for a cuddle the next.

The girls are fast approaching 13, the age that Chevonea Kendall-Bryan was when she leaned out of one of the windows on the fourth floor of a block of flats on this street. A boy she knew was down here on the ground, but this was not Romeo and Juliet. Far from it.

Chevonea had been pressurised into performing a sex act on him, and he had shared a phone clip of her doing so with all his mates. She threatened to jump from the window if he did not delete it. Then she slipped and fell 60 feet to the ground, dying from massive brain injuries.

Her mother says she will now campaign against what is happening to young girls in our society. They are certainly under extreme pressure, having to cope with a world more brutal, more demanding and far more overtly sexual than anything their parents knew.

“Never before has girlhood been under such a sustained assault – from ads, alcohol marketing, girls’ magazines, sexually explicit TV programmes and the hard pornography that is regularly accessed in so many teenager’s bedrooms,” says the psychologist Steve Biddulph, currently touring the country to promote a book called Raising Girls.

Read here

By Ed West, Telegraph

From BBC News

From The Christian Institute

School children aged nine to ten in Canada have been shown a sexually-charged video of bikini-clad drag queens as part of a class on “transgender issues”.

Furious parents have complained to the school and the teacher, Joe Winkler, has been suspended while authorities carry out an investigation.

Mr Winkler, who is gay, said: “When I found the video, I thought it would be an excellent way of introducing the children to transgender issues.”
 
He insists there is no sexual content in the video but one parent, Al Smith, said: “At the end, the guy’s peeling the banana, acting very sexually with the banana.”

Mr Smith added: “When I was at the school this morning there were parents pulling their kids out of class, which to me is a pretty clear sign that you’ve offended some people.”

Canada redefined marriage to allow same-sex marriage in 2005. Since then there have been a number of controversies over how the issue is handled in schools.

Read here

Video here

From Morality Forum

In Britain today, pornography is readily available: 27 channels of porn are coming into our nation from abroad. After Britain, in other European countries the highest intake of porn channels is 4 or 5! So called “soft” porn is on sale in newsagents, supermarkets, petrol stations etc. “Hardcore” porn is sold in licensed sex shops. Tapping in the word “porn” on the internet to one server alone brings up 24,522 sites! The government only considers categories such as child porn as being unacceptable and therefore legislated against.

There is a question that needs to be asked regarding pornography: Is it harmful, or, is it just harmless “adult” entertainment? The government and the various regulatory bodies seem to base their thinking on moral issues on liberal, humanistic, amoral, thinking: “Adults are entitled to make up their own minds.” The film censors are now releasing films which were banned in previous years. It seems that it is an “anything goes” attitude with the ever increasing levels of sex, violence, and bad language in the media, films, etc.

A study of 88 civilisations in the 1940’s by Professor J.D. Unwin from Cambridge University showed that, whenever there was widespread promiscuity, premarital sex, infidelity, and same sex relationships, the civilisation was dead within three generations-with no exceptions! Studies by other historians such as Arnold Toynbee show conclusively, that no society in history has been able to survive for long without a strong moral code, and, that immorality corrupts individuals and destroys societies! Moral and spiritual values have been in constant decline in Britain since the nineteen fifties. The results are: a ten-fold increase in crimes and enormous increases in social problems! WE REAP AS WE SOW!

Read here

by Mark Regnerus, The Public Discourse

[...]  Data from the New Family Structures Study reveal that when young adult Americans (ages 23-39) are asked about their level of agreement with the statement “It should be legal for gays and lesbians to marry in America,” the gender difference emerges, just as expected: 42 percent of men agreed or strongly agreed, compared with 47 percent of women of the same age. More men than women disagreed or strongly disagreed (37 versus 30 percent), while comparable levels (21-23 percent) said they were “unsure.”

By Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

One of the most pressing anxieties of responsible parents is how to stop their children from accessing pornography on the internet.

Nearly three-quarters of nine to 16-year-olds in Britain go online daily. Growing numbers of three and four-year-old children are accessing the net.

So preventing them from stumbling across or even choosing to download internet porn is a very real problem.
 
There is cross-party support for tougher online controls, reflecting acute parental anxiety.

In a consultation exercise, half of parents said they wanted some content blocked automatically.

So the Government’s proposals, which were slipped out quietly a few days ago on the Department for Education website as if it didn’t want anyone to notice, have left many frankly baffled.

For it said that while access to internet porn would be banned in public places, no such ban would apply to private use.

It has rejected plans — supported by the NSPCC — to block access to ‘adult’ content automatically so internet users would have to opt in to see it.

So children won’t be able to access the stuff in cafes, shops or railway stations, but will be able to do so in the privacy of their own bedrooms. What is the logic of that?
 
The Government’s arguments are mystifying. It claims, for example, that an opt-in system would create a ‘false sense of security’ because not all harmful content would be screened out, and that it would not combat online bullying of children, abuse or grooming by paedophiles.

What a bizarre argument that because controls would not stop every single undesirable activity it is not worth having any controls at all!

Read here

Read also:  Children pore over sexual images as their parents watch Downton in the next room… yet ministers do nothing by Harriet Harman, Mailonline

(David Lindsay comments on Harriet Harman's past record concerning children here, and earlier here)

By Rowena Mason, Telegraph

David Cameron has rejected proposals for an automatic block on online pornography over fears parents would assume the internet was safe for their children.

The Government decided against bringing in new anti-pornography filters for the internet, less than a year after the Prime Minister intervened to say they should be considered.

In May, Mr Cameron ordered officials to examine the case for filters, which would have forced people actively to request an internet connection that gives access to adult material. The default option would have been a porn-free internet service.

However, the Government has now decided that this type of “opt-in” system “can create a false sense of security” because it does not screen out all harmful content.

There were also fears it could have “over-blocked” useful websites giving children access to “helpful information on sexual health or sexual identity”.

The consultation on an automatic blocking system was launched, after a group of MPs warned internet service providers need to do more to protect children from harmful images.

Campaigners, led by Claire Perry, Tory MP for Devizes, handed a petition of 115,000 names into Downing Street in September demanding an opt-in system for pornography.

Read here