Our Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist appeared before the NSW Standing Committee on Social issues examining the ‘Impacts of harmful pornography on mental, and physical health’ at its first public hearing Monday. This was her opening statement.
The pornography industry is significantly responsible for the harmful sexual socialisation of a generation of young people.
The world’s largest department of education has contributed to rising rates of violence against women, harmful sexual behaviours/peer-on-peer sexual abuse at levels never before seen.
A generation of boys exposed to rape porn, sadism, torture, incest porn, at the click of a button.
The French equality watchdog found 90% of porn features violence against women with much of it amounting to torture.
30–60 percent of all incidents of childhood sexual abuse are carried out by other children and young people. Data from the landmark Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) state: “Child Sexual Abuse by known adolescents [in non-romantic relationships] is by far the single most common category of offending.”
Professor Michael Salter in the Child Light submission, states: “The widespread availability of pornography appears to be driving the increased perpetration of sexual violence by children, particularly boys.
Girls report routine sexual harassment and abuse by male students: touching, rape threats, sexual bullying, body shaming, sexual moaning and sexual gestures and boys trying to choke them. Boys commonly share porn at schools, airdropping it to kids on the bus, sending girls live masturbation videos.
79.9% of teachers were seeing more sexualised behaviour in schools from as young as Year 2 including children simulating sex acts on other children as documented in our report ‘Sexual Harassment of Teachers’ [SHOT] released by Collective Shout and author and parenting expert Maggie Dent late last year.
Many teachers identified pornography exposure as a significant driver of the rise in harmful sexual behaviours in schools. One said:
“I believe there is an increasing disconnect between women as human beings, and women as objects and I attribute this corrosion of respectful and boundary driven relationships to unfettered access to pornography.”
We urge you to use every lever at your disposal to ameliorate these harms.
Read our Submission on the Impacts of Harmful Pornography on Mental, Emotional and Physical Health here.
See also: Sexual Harassment of Teachers’ [SHoT] report, Collective Shout/Maggie Dent, here.
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