Is your child searching for porn?
According to Symantec (note: they produce internet filtering software), the top 5 search terms for children seven years of age and under are:
- YouTube
- Porn
- Club Penguin (a Disney site for children)
Children aren’t accidentally stumbling across these sites whilst searching for something else. They are searching for porn. Typing ‘porn’ into their browsers - a web search I don’t recommend anyone does, let alone children under 7.
Are your children doing this? I hope not, but these are awful statistics.
Even YouTube isn’t an edifying place for children (or in many respects, for adults), with one report revealing that YouTube returns 330,000 results for ‘porn’. The report explains (and this is obvious to those who have used YouTube) that soft-core pornography is common-place throughout the site, not to mention the advertisements (subtle and not so subtle) for adult sites and sexually explicit concepts.
Some questions come to mind in the face of these statistics:
- Why are children searching for ‘porn’?
- What is your family doing to protect your children from being exposed to this content? Monitoring computer usage, not allowing kids to have computers in their own rooms, and using filters like this and this are a good start.
- What is your church doing to help families in your community to protect their children from being exposed this content? One idea is for churches to host community seminars like this.
- What are we, as Christians, doing to protect children in our nation from being exposed to this content? Sure, I understand the challenges of implementing a nation-wide filter, but is there anything else we can be doing to actively reject this evil?
- What will be the long-term consequences for a society whose children have been exposed to porn from such a young age?
As has been mentioned on this site and elsewhere before, porn is an epidemic in the adult world too, even among Christians.
In March, Outreach Media will be running an awareness campaign to promote this problem, and importantly, Jesus as the solution. This campaign will be coupled with resources for churches, and an information seminar. The seminar will include Bible teaching, plus insights from a Christian psychologist experienced in treating people suffering from pornography addition. An information kit will be available for download at the Outreach Media website in early February so any church will be able to run their own seminar.
