Protecting children online.

The views expressed in this post are my own and not those of my party.

As a father I am all in favour of governments taking action to protect children from all forms of abuse. There should be heavy penalties for anyone involved in creating or distributing child pornography.

It is also a good thing to have policies in place to make it more difficult for children to get access to pornography - though anyone who thinks you can completely stop all teenagers from doing so is wildly optimistic - and to restrict public displays of such material so as to make it easier for those who do not wish to see it to go about their lives without doing so,

However, the policies which are enacted in support of these laudable aims should be realistic, practical and proportionate.

Our laws should also be designed to avoid driving people who not currently breaking the law and whose activities it is not proposed to criminalise into the arms of suppliers who are outside the law.

I would like to see the government bring together a task force of people who genuinely understand the internet and people from law enforcement who understand, as well as any sane and balanced person can, the minds of those who prey on children, and get them to devise a policy which will; actually work to protect children online and crack down on child pornography but, as far as possible, leave adults who look in private at material involving consenting adults alone.

I think that is in fact what the policies of the present government and its immediate predecessors were designed to do but I'm not convinced that present policies or those which are planned will actually achieve it.

Some of the practical problems which need to be resolved are given in an opinion piece in Wired by Rowland Manthorp, last updated on 6th March 2019, which you can read here. I don't agree with every word he writes, but his arguments that the currently proposed regime will not work and will actually encourage illegal behaviour strike me as all too plausible.

Is British politics mature enough to permit an intelligent debate on this issue, in which one can call for a rethink without one's words being twisted to score very nasty political points? 

Comments

Jamess said…
Thanks for sharing this. This is one more, just a bit recent article. It shows five different ways how to block porn sites https://medium.com/@harrysilvers62/how-to-block-porn-sites-e7c3ffdf2a7. It should be useful for parents
9:44 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more