Letters: June 18, 2016

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The dangers of porn

A GENERATION of children are in danger of being stripped of their childhoods by stumbling across extreme and violent porn online.

The staggering number of images and videos available online are not difficult to access and the impact on young people can be very damaging.

This is not just ‘boys being boys’. We are constantly hearing from children about the negative effect of watching porn. Some felt it incited them to self-harm, lose weight or even emulate violent and degrading portrayals of sex. That can’t be right.

Most often it leaves them confused which, frankly, is not surprising. This kind of content is sometimes difficult for even an adult to begin to comprehend.

The NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner for England commissioned research to highlight the scale to which young people are exposed to pornography – and the numbers are significant.

A survey of more than 1,000 children aged 11-16 by Middlesex University found at least half had been exposed to online porn, with almost all (94 per cent) having seen it by age 14.

It’s our belief that children should be protected from adult content online, just as they are in the offline world. We believe there are a number of measures that can protect children from the potential harmful influence of adult pornography, or pressure to send indecent images of themselves.

Technology companies need to ensure there are effective controls in place. The government needs to implement age verification legislation as a matter of urgency across all online platforms

We need more appropriate advice and information about sex so youngsters don’t feel the need to turn elsewhere.

Young people need to be given the skills, knowledge and resilience to critically assess and challenge negative depictions of sex and relationships, through education.

Only now are we beginning to understand its impact on ‘smartphone kids’ – the first generation to have been raised with technology that’s taken the internet from the front room, where parents can monitor use, to their bedrooms, where they can’t. And that means it is even more vital to ensure protection is in place and building children’s digital resilience is key.

We must enhance their awareness and understanding of the content they either seek, or stumble across – and ensure sex is placed in the context of loving, respectful relationships based on mutual consent.

SHARON COPSEY

NSPCC regional head of service for the South West

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Leaving a huge risk

THOUGHTS from a Remain voter (not a “bleeding heart” as a recent contributor rather insultingly inferred). Will Brexit address immigration? The majority of immigrants to this country come from outside the EU so nothing will change there. Of the minority that are from the EU, most will still be allowed in anyway as we need them!

Will Brexit make us more secure? We will still have thousands of miles of easily accessible, unguarded coastline and to make things easier for those wishing to do us harm, France will no longer be obliged to hold anyone back at its borders.

Will Brexit help us financially? The vast majority of independent experts on the subject have all agreed it will damage our economy.

I suspect a post-Brexit Britain in a couple of years will see many feeling a huge sense of anti-climax that things did not turn out as they had been promised and we’ll be left with Messrs Johnson, Farage and Gove running the country – I shudder at the thought.

The world faces multiple threats from climate change to terrorism. Never has it been more important for nations to work together, to pool resources and expertise, this is not a time to pull up the drawbridge and try to live in selfish isolation from our nearest neighbours. If we leave now, we’ll not be allowed back, please think hard before taking such a huge risk.

NICK PERRY

Covingham

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Truths about empires

RE EMPIRES eventually fall (Adver, Steve Halden, June 13). What history book has Steve Halden been browsing? History for Dummies?

He states: “It (The Roman Empire) eventually collapsed because within every nation there is a yearning for independence. The fall of the Roman Empire led to freedom and democracy in Europe.”

Freedom and democracy? Nation? Prior to the 1550s the nation state didn’t even exist!

Our democracy is relatively modern also. The system Augustus Caesar created gave the empire some 250 years of stability, when it was both larger and more prosperous than any other time.

The fall of the Roman Empire was one of the most significant transformations throughout the whole of human history.

A hundred years before it happened, Rome was an immense power, defended by an immense army. A hundred years later, power and army had vanished.

There was no longer any Western empire at all. Its territory was occupied by a group of German kingdoms: feudal lords and serfdom not freedom and democracy as Steve Haldon naively asserts!

Hundreds of reasons have been suggested for its demise. No-one really knows the reason. Edward Gibbon’s superb ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ lists at least two dozen supposed causes: military, political, economical and psychological being among the main ones.

When the end came for Britain, its rulers unsuccessfully begged Rome (who had withdrawn its own soldiers to protect its own borders) to protect them against invaders – so much for Steve Halden’s preposterous ‘a yearning for independence’.

For an enormous, complex institution like the Roman Empire could not have been obliterated by any single, simple cause as Steve Halden naively suggests. It perished, partly, because of certain internal flaws which prevented resolute resistance to the invaders. These flaws set Roman against Roman.

“Its long-drawn-out demise,” declared Edward Gibbon, “will ever be remembered, and it is still felt by the nations of the Earth.”

Steve Haldon has always struck me as a few sausages short of a full breakfast. His latest submission confirms it.

JEFF ADAMS

Bloomsbury Close

Swindon