10 Things Parents Need To Know About Internet Pornography

If that weren't enough of a No one wants to talk about pornography. It's an awkward and uncomfortable subject, but if we don't take the time to learn why pornography can be so destructive, we won't have the knowledge that we need to protect our families.

During the past several years, I have had the opportunity to talk with plenty of people who emphatically said, "pornography is bad for you", and I completely agree with them. But when I asked them why it's bad, I got a lot of blank stares. The same people who felt so passionate about their beliefs only seemed to be repeating what they had heard from a friend, parent or religious advisor.

The truth is there are plenty of problems associated with pornography use. I would like to take this opportunity to explain, what I consider to be, ten of the more important issues concerning pornography abuse. I hope these ten points will shed some light on the darkness of this subject matter and arm you with some new tools that can help you keep yourself and your families safe.


1). Due to a lack of regulation, the Internet contains some of the darkest, most disturbing, and easily-accessible pornography ever created.
With the exception of child pornography, no other form of Internet pornography is vigorously investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement. Why? Because the courts cannot decide on whose definition of "pornography" to use, when the Internet is available to everyone, everywhere. Therefore, obscenity cases that were once routinely prosecuted are now stuck in limbo.

problem, the computers that are used to publish pornography to the Internet can exist anywhere-including countries with relaxed or non-existent obscenity laws-leaving the door wide open to pornographers to do what they want.

The combination of a lack of Internet regulations, law enforcement's inability to prosecute obscenity laws, deteriorating social morals, and a $50-billion-dollar market for pornography worldwide has pornographers rushing-in to do anything and everything they can to grab as much of that money as possible, regardless of the harm they may cause to children, adults, and the performers themselves.

The end result is that the Internet has some of the darkest, most-disturbing, most-violent and easily-accessible pornography known to man. The Internet is not a family-friendly place. Don't treat it like it is.

2). Pornography is not a victimless crime.
Some people would have you believe that pornography is a victimless crime. That is not true. Pornography frequently takes advantage of and abuses underage or barely-18-year-old individuals, luring them into the industry with promises of wealth and fame. Before these individuals can appreciate the magnitude of their decisions, they can be mentally and physically abused, contract sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, develop drug and drinking addictions, alienate themselves from family members, and succumb to the notion that pornography is all they will ever accomplish with their lives.

Other performers are enslaved through drug and drinking habits or are simply abducted into sex-slave rings. These performers are coerced either implicitly or explicitly into performing increasingly-degrading sexual acts, with little hope of escape.

When you view pornography or allow it to be viewed, you are contributing to the crimes and abuse being perpetuated against these unfortunate souls.

3). On the Internet, everything is connected to everything else
Everything on the Internet-websites, webpages, images, videos, etc.-is connected by hyperlinks (links) to everything else on the Internet. Just because your children visit family-friendly websites like Disney.com or Nickelodeon.com doesn't mean they are safe.

With a couple of mouse clicks or by visiting less-scrupulous websites, your children could find themselves in the darker corners of the Internet very quickly. For example, youtube.com, a popular video hosting site, not only contains videos that are appropriate for children, but also videos that are nothing more than advertisements for adult websites.

Another problem occurs when, with a few clicks of the mouse, your children wander from a clean site to a more questionable site, and finally to a website that is completely inappropriate. These types of links often exist within forums, blogs and other social networking websites..

You should know what websites your children visit and check any external links from those websites. You should also consider making websites that have mixed content and questionable links off limits.

You should also be concerned about gateway websites. Similar in respect to gateway drugs, like smoking, drinking and marijuana, pornography has gateway websites. These sites contain softer, more subtle forms of pornography (e.g., bikini websites, lingerie websites, or "funny"-but-sexually-suggestive-video websites), but link to increasingly harder forms of porn. The danger being that an unaware individual can be lead along a path to abuse and addiction by visiting increasingly harder-pornographic websites in order to feed his fascination.

4). Internet pornography isn't just on the Internet
Internet pornography is digital pornography, images and videos that can be easily copied and transported via a variety of different media and applications. In other words, a Web browser isn't the only way to access Internet pornography in your home.

Digital pornography can be easily copied and saved onto your home computer, a CD, a DVD, a USB thumb drive, or external hard drive. It can be sent and received via email, instant messaging, peer-to-peer (P2P), and other applications that have nothing to do with a browser. You can also access pornography with a number of web-enabled devices, such as a PSP (Playstation Portable), XBOX, or cell phone.

Just because the browser's history is clean doesn't mean that someone isn't accessing pornography in your home.

5). What's legal and what's not illegal
Is it legal for a website to allow your children to access pornography? Since adult websites aren't being prosecuted for allowing minors to access pornography, it is essentially not illegal.

Some adult websites do use a warning page as their home page, with a simple question: "Are you an adult? Enter or Exit." These warning pages often feature pornographic content and act more like a teaser than a security feature. After all, there is no real technology behind that question. It is up to the user-in some cases a curious child-to decide whether to click on the "Enter" or the "Exit" button.

Furthermore, as I have stated earlier, the only form of pornography that is regularly investigated and prosecuted is child pornography. Your children need to know that taking nude/sexual pictures of themselves or their friends-even if the pictures were taken jokingly or accidentally-could be considered by law enforcement as child pornography. There are, in fact, many minors who are facing child-pornography charges for doing just that.

Lastly, you and your children should understand that the Internet can be forever. What I mean by "forever" is that if your children post a nude/sexual picture of themselves on the Internet that image could remain in cyberspace forever, haunting them for the rest of their lives. Even if law enforcement gets involved, that doesn't guarantee the image will be removed from the Internet.

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