A brief rant

I want to rant this morning. I happened on a Facebook page – I have never closed a page so fast. But it also made me really sad – that a group of females see no harm in placing such content on their page.

 

What continues to shock me – perhaps I am just easy to shock – is just how readily available pornography is on-line. Now if it was an adult couple come together, some seduction and full out sexual encounter – it would at least be showing a ‘normal’ experience – some pretext that the encounter was a loving one.

 

But the stuff that is out there, is extremely violent – girls and women are badly abused in the making of modern porn.

 

I do not understand why the sexual encounter has to be so brutalized – but it is – and this is what our children are going to view and assume to be normal.

 

Boys are growing up thinking that women want to be brutalized and ganged up on and our poor girls are growing up thinking, this is what is expected of them.

 

Boys also grow up seeing girls and women as objects for their use. More scary is that they may enact what they see at a very young age. Cases of child-on-child sexual abuse due to watching pornography will increase….

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10674065/Pornography-a-dark-influence-on-children-NSPCC.html

 

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), in the UK, has conducted surveys among children presenting the dangers of watching pornography.

 

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/fighting-for-childhood/news-opinion/online-porn-evidence-impact-young-people/

 

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/online-porn/

 

The UK government has passed laws that restrict access to porn.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11745550/David-Camerons-bid-to-protect-children-from-pornography-could-be-scuppered-by-EU-laws-on-internet-neutrality.html

 

We need to do more in Africa. We really do need to push our governments to enact stricter controls on access to pornography – so that, like in the UK – you should opt in to get access to pornography.

 

As parents, we really cannot do what our parents did – teaching the fear of teenage pregnancy and disease – we need to talk more – in a bit more detail than our parents and teachers did. The normalization of brutality should not be allowed to escalate.

 

Our children will all need the internet with their homework. I have watched mothers of lovely teenage sons and what I see with them is that before the age of 18 – the computer is in a public space. But this might not be the case at their friend’s houses – and there are smart phones now –  but what I see with these parents is a lot of open communication about relationships and sex.

 

All children are curious about sex – it’s normal – but we have to watch where their images come from. I preach to myself here to – let’s do our best to get this right.