Let's deal with the reasons why children are accessing adult content sites, rather than introducing compulsory censorship

Young children should be protected from internet porn, on this we can presumably all agree.  Tory MP, Claire Perry is David Cameron’s special advisor on ‘preventing the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood',  and she believes very strongly that the way to protect children from seeing inappropriate material, is to force UK internet companies to have adult content automatically blocked on the services they provide to the public.  At the moment, users have to install filters themselves, if they don’t wish to access pornography sites. Perry is pushing for services to come pre-filtered, so customers have to activate the option for adult content.  She’s even suggested parents should receive an email notification if their child tries to remove the filter.

But is this the most insightful approach to the problem?

Psychologists and analysts such as Sue Gerhardt, often link the growth of the porn industry in recent decades, and the increasingly graphic images users are accessing, to the growth in consumerism generally and the change in children’s early lives, compared to just thirty years ago.

From a very young age, children are being encouraged now to become emotionally independent, long before their brains have adapted for separation from their main caregivers, and this started, as with most ideas which have caused problems in society, with Margaret Thatcher, who was keen for women to work, rather than be stay at home mothers, because her economic policy depended on mass consumption.  Two wages coming in, meant double the buying power.  Psychologists like John Bowlby were warning back in the 50s, that separation anxiety was likely to damage children emotionally.  They would struggle to form secure attachments with humans, retreating to a world where they would turn to objects to comfort them, rather than people, who they had learned couldn’t be trusted to meet their needs.  Others have gone on to reveal that such children often develop a need for instant gratification from these objects, such is the way the brain has developed without sufficient emotional bonding with a parent. 

Online pornography perhaps provides the ultimate instant gratification fix, and addiction to porn is becoming increasingly common.

Many of us think Claire Perry and her colleagues are approaching the problem of online pornography from the wrong end.  And after all, she has often admitted that children tend to be much more internet savvy than their parents, and will always find ways around the obstacles adults present.  This is even more likely if they are developing an addiction to adult sites.  She risks being caricatured as a modern day Mary Whitehouse, with her approach to the problem.  Mrs Whitehouse was famously reported to have dedicated many hours each day to watching TV broadcasts containing increasingly graphic sexual content – just so that she could tell us all how filthy it was!  The comparison will do Perry no favours.

Longitudinal studies have found that boy babies who do receive sufficient nurturing, including being breast fed rather than bottle fed, are more likely to grow up developing a healthy respect for women and an ability to form long lasting positive relationships with them, compared to those who were deprived of their mothers early on in life, and this is hardly surprising. 

If governments are serious about wanting to reduce the amount of pornography users demand, it would make much more sense to tackle the problem at its source. That would be better for babies, better for adolescents and adult men, and better for society in the long term.