Internet pornography

It is no surprise that pornographic sites on the internet in the past few years made pornographic contents widely available to anyone regardless of age with access to the WWW. Because of the high availability and large quantity of online pornography, many parents fear cyberporn will cause greater social harm than traditional forms of pornographic materials such as magazines, DVD and so on. Concerns about explosion of cybersex have given rise to a moral panic (McMurdo 1997). So, it is reasonable to expect that exposure to the highly interactive internet pornography may exert a greater influence upon adolescent and children permissive sexual attitudes and behavior. According to the some experimental research, the influence of exposure to internet pornography was greater than that of exposure to traditional forms of pornographic contents. Indeed, young children and adolescent have to be protected from those harmful pornographic contents.

I guess many people believe that regulation is the only solution to protecting children from cyberporn. But, internet is hard to regulate or control. Moreover, it is unclear to define what the porno is and who is responsible? Some people might think that porno is an art but some do not. For adult entertainment industry, it could be a serious business for them. We need to consider the difference between harmful material such as sexually explicit and illegal material such as child pornography.

In my opinion, so far, the best answer for the censoring internet pornography is the conjunction of self-regulation and new technology such as filtering or censoring software and rating systems. Also, awareness actions for parents and teachers are crucial. From now on, we have to find out something less restrictive ways to protect child without infringing on the rights of adult such as the applications of newly developed illicit content filtering technology.