Protect children

Your article ‘Sexting threat to young teenagers’ (December 30) highlights just one of the dangers of the Technological Age.

It is likely that freely available Internet pornography has played a major role in the increasingly widespread use of sexting.

Our children – not only teenagers – are confronted by a vast amount of internet porn day and night, which research has shown can have profoundly damaging psychological effects on their sexual development. It invariably depicts women as sexual objects, to be used solely for male gratification.

One psychologist describes it as “a brutal way to be introduced to sexuality”. It isn’t difficult to see the connection between this and sexting, which is, essentially, DIY pornography.

It used to be the case that ‘home’ was a safe place for most children, but not any more.

Nowadays, home is where they are seriously at risk of being corrupted, psychologically harmed, humiliated, bullied, and seduced by predators – all at the touch of a button or click of a mouse.

Professionals from organisations such as the Swindon Sanctuary Sexual Assault Referral Centre are no doubt doing their best, but they are actually only a part of a piecemeal, inadequate approach.

The need is for the root causes to be tackled on a much wider front, rather than dealing with the growing number of casualties where harm has already been done. It is long overdue for our politicians to treat these matters as urgent. The alternative is our children will have to pay an unacceptably high price.

Basil Jones, Stop Harming Our Children (SHOC), Grosvenor Road, Old Town, Swindon

 

Erroneous claim

Your correspondent Rob Fenton is to be congratulated on being a Foodbank volunteer, as without men and women of such a generous disposition, many of charitable projects in town would not exist. But I wonder whether he is in danger of biting the hand that feeds when he claims “The haves ‘have’ and the rest just get cast aside”. Surely his previous comment proves this claim as erroneous, as he states “donations come from ‘Joe Bloggs’ in the street…”

To be able to give, the ‘Joe Bloggs’ to whom he refers must first ‘have’ – so the truth is it is the the ‘haves’ who are giving’ and they are clearly giving more, clearly evidenced by the growth in the number of Foodbanks.

The needy ‘rest’ of Rob Fenton’s letter are not “just cast aside” – society in a number of ways provides for their needs. Some may argue that the provision is not enough, that will always be a subject of debate, but to imply that those who ‘have’ do not care is very wide of the mark.

Where Rob and I will always agree is in the need to question and challenge the logic of a Foreign Aid policy that funds anything other than real emergencies.

It is necessary to ensure the welfare and security of the people of this country before we offer £12bn to countries which are more than capable of looking after their own people.

Des Morgan, Caraway Drive, Swindon

 

Worry over bedsit

I had a talk with Councillor Stan Pajak about my objection to bedsit houses that have been made up recently.

One has gone up by landlords next door to where I live. There were months of banging by workmen.

Although I am 95 years old, I received no apology from these people. In fact, as I was born in this house, perhaps they thought I should be moving soon, and then they could increase their stock of bedrooms. I feel these properties are wrong for Britain and will be the slums of the future.

I am against more immigration and this is partly why. We do not have housing, jobs or services and now this government will allow thousands more into this country.

We are already the highest populated country in Europe and in the next few years we could be the highest populated in the world. What are the MPs thinking of?

G Ing, Newcastle Street, Swindon

 

Cost of inequality

As we move away from the season of goodwill to all and enter the New Year the question that has to be asked is have things really got better generally for the people of the world?

For some they certainly have, according to the ‘Global Wealth Report 2013’ released late last year by Credit Suisse. A mere 0.7 per cent of the world’s adult population controls 41 per cent of the world’s total wealth and the top 10 per cent owns 86 per cent of all global wealth.

In stark contrast, 50 per cent of the world’s adult population only owned one per cent of the world’s wealth. Added to these statistics, the report by Oxfam ‘The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all’ also states the wealth made by the world’s richest 100 adults last year could end poverty four-times over.

So a further question has to be asked – has capitalism and its big brother globalisation in reality done anything for around 90 per cent of the world’s population? Based upon the above figures it appears it has done very little.

Dr David Hill, Chief Executive, World Innovation Foundation, Huddersfield

 

Question of life

Can someone please explain to me why is it near on impossible to live in a British commonwealth country and equally hard for a commonwealth country citizen to live here, yet if you live in an EU country’s colony, for example Goa in India and some African countries, you have the same rights to live here as the EU country?

Gary Darling, Grange Park, Swindon