There are two ways to protect children from the damaging and misleading depictions of sex they get from online pornography. One is to give them comprehensive age-appropriate sex education, so that they understand porn is not a guide to real life and have the information to process what they see. The other is to ban porn for everyone, adults included.
David Cameron’s government tried the latter approach, with mandatory safeguards enforced by internet providers and censorship of adult websites. Now Theresa May’s government, under the guidance of education secretary Justine Greening, is trying the less draconian and more practical approach, by announcing compulsory school sex education that addresses the issues of online pornography in addition to the standard reproductive biology.
The ‘family-focussed’ social conservatives are not happy about this. They say children need to be ‘protected’ rather than educated.
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