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Conflating legal pornography with online child abuse images is dangerous. So why does the government keep on doing it?

Every time the government rampages about legal online pornography in the same breath as online child abuse content, it is damaging. One is a devastating crime that should be dealt with by our criminal justice system, with the help of internet providers, the other is a legal and legitimate pastime most adults in this country will have enjoyed at some point -- some at many points.


Yet the Culture, Media and Sport Committee has, once again, decided to deal with online harassment, child abuse and legal pornography in one report -- the online safety report, which has over time adopted the agenda of scaremongering politicians eager to "protect our children", at any expense. The result has been a threat to prosecute/block pornography websites that don't implement age verification (which, we all know, is fairly useless at preventing anyone looking at anything).

These individuals have led the charge in blocking content at home, at schools and in public. The latter is markedly ridiculous -- the voice of these few scaremongers has become so loud, it suddenly became an urgent priority to block pornography on public Wi-Fi, "for the sake of the children". (Aside from porn addicts, it's probably kids themselves that are trying to sneak a look on their mobiles away from prying eyes.)

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And parents, just talk to your kids about porn -- don't outsource parenting to the government. It won't be good

It's voices like this, the government is listening to: "While parents should be responsible for monitoring their children's internet safety, in practice this is not happening."


It's the ever-ominous tones of MP Claire Perry, who has been tirelessly working to salvage the innocence of youth from the beast that is the internet (they even gave her the title, 'Special Advisor on preventing the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood', so it's official and everything). What she means is, you're not looking after your children properly, so we'll do it for you.

The purpose of all this -- of telling parents the very dangers they fear the most are actually in their homes, in their schools, in the streets, under their beds (it's inescapable, this internet thing!), of forcing public companies to implement censorship measures (albeit ones that switch off), of telling social networks they should change their algorithms to protect all of us from content the government deems "unsavoury", of releasing a report that calls pornography "harmful" while throwing in mention of a few scary sounding laws with the word Obscene in the title -- is to narrow and convolute our sense of right and wrong, and keep a few hangers-on in office.

The result of mentioning the blocking of "harmful adult content" that fails to prevent clicks from kids, in the same breath as illegal, devastating child abuse content, is that every news outlet in the UK has at some point or another referred to the latter as "child porn". The BBC's headline on a story about the report, for instance is "Online porn and bullying -- children 'need more protection'", and two paragraphs on child protection from these ills is followed by a "child porn" mention.


Child abuse is not pornography -- the moment we start referring to it as such, we are throwing it in with legal, totally acceptable content and we are channelling the voice of the abusers. This, is what's harmful. "It's very easy for the two issues to get confused and it's not a particularly helpful way to think about very different issues,"

Claire Lilley, head of online child safety at the NSPCC, told Wired.co.uk. "What we should do about illegal child abuse images is very clear cut -- the other matter is much more subjective and there's greater variation of opinion among the public. Every adult has the right to see it if they want to -- there's no grey area. That's why we don't like using the term child pornography. That doesn't help clarify the difference between the two." "Publication of obscene material, including child abuse images and extreme adult pornography, is illegal under the Obscene Publications Act 1959," reads the report -- directly aligning the two. What it fails to mention here is the high bar set by the law as to what is "obscene". The report even mentions how the government recognised the "harmful" quality of such pornography with its Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 -- but totally failed to mention that that content is not something you or I would consider pornography (the law covers rape, other severe physical abuse and necrophilia).

The result: one legal or moral misunderstanding follows after the other, till an adult's right to freely access legal content is squashed into oblivion. Better to focus on the serious crimes being committed that truly are harmful to children. And parents, just talk to your kids about porn -- don't outsource parenting to the government. It won't be good.