Opinion | What Hong Kong can learn from Britain in protecting children from online porn
- Exposure to online porn, especially unwittingly through social media, is having a negative effect on children and young people
- Britain’s Online Safety Bill is pushing for tougher laws yet Hong Kong’s cybercrime subcommittee did not even include online pornography in its preliminary report
In January this year, the children’s commissioner for England and Wales, Rachel de Souza, reported that young people were frequently exposed to violent pornography, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sexual activities, with many having encountered violent pornography before their 18th birthday.
She also revealed that those who used pornography frequently were the most likely to indulge in physically aggressive sexual behaviour. Pornography was far from confined to adult sites, she disclosed, with Twitter the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen it.
In March, Dignify, a sexual abuse charity, reported that, of the 4,000 children aged between 14 and 18 it surveyed, 22 per cent had viewed pornography on multiple occasions, with one in five admitting to having a porn habit, and one in 10 feeling addicted. One head teacher called the impact of violent pornography on her pupils severe, with her school using specialised training techniques to respond to a big increase in sexual abuse cases.
As Dignify’s CEO, Helen Roberts, acknowledges, it is “impossible to tackle the embedded behaviours of sexual harassment [in schools] without talking about the harmful impact pornography is having on children and young people”.
