Having read the posts here and the replying comments it is obvious some of you have downloaded or uploaded some nasty stuff to say the least. Obviously you look at that and what do you see? Your right to watch depravity? Or just funny stuff?

Has this become a society where you can watch anything and you all seem to think that's okay? Well by most decent society standards, it is not okay and children should certainly not have access to it. Therefore if you are not willing to protect young people from watching this sort of garbage, then perhaps we should have censorship.

I was on the side of most people to begin with, willing to protect the rights of adults to watch what they may, provided of course, children are protected from access, but most of you have changed my mind because most of you have watched, from what I can tell, the most terribly depravity and seem to think it is alright. You even put the sites up there to access.... Just in the name of research I suppose? Or do you get a kick out of it?

Where are you at, what is wrong with you? Why do you think that everyone should have access to watch every depravity there is known to man? It seems most of you do. This really saddens me.

What really pisses me off is that I am asked to "remove the profanity". Yeh right.

Piper

I can only respond at an emotional level on this topic. The images disturb me a great deal. As do the types of porn where adults are being tortured or humiliated.

There have been extensive arguments on OLO regarding censorship, there are those who will claim that the viewing of porn reduces sexual assault on women. Frankly I find this counter-intuitive. But if true, what does the viewing of child abuse reduce, if anything?

Maybe I'm a prude too, despite having argued in favour of the photographic work of Bill Henson - I thought the reaction to his photographs were more a reflection of our own issues with sexuality rather than child exploitation.

I don't know what the answer is, the guidelines for establishing the 'rating' of a film, as outlined by Sylvia, can clearly be adapted to the personal interpretation of whichever ACMA officer is viewing - entirely subjective.

Rae Bee - no one here is endorsing the images and links, you have completely misunderstood what is being expressed here. However, in order to understand what the issue is, it does help to have knowledge (in this case view) of what we are discussing.

Morning Fractelle, I looked, I went [gasp] and then I went Click/gone, just was not my personal cup of tea although if you want it in an art gallery it is not my business and of course Mr Stuart and Sylvia gave an explanation about what the content was going to be.

Okay so I am thinking the internet needs to be policed at the PC level. Parents control it, filter, block whatever. Do we need the ACMA people to do the classification so that a filter or something will work?

My kids... no problem chatting online at 5 years old (funny watching a little kid in chat with their father), they could work in dos and execute programs. Years later and my son got suspended from high school for bypassing the filters. Obviously he was always going to work in IT. This makes me wonder if filters etc would work anyway. And why is the girl working at Maccas?

Hey (bit of waffle) my boy rang the other day and got me to log in to something which gave him total control over my computer so he could fix something. Watching the little mouse arrow move and open things was about the spookiest thing I have ever seen. Technology wise I really do need to catch up.

I know my foxtel has a code thing for movies. Course I have to keep asking my kids what the code is. The little kids have one channel and no access to change it. One day a sneaky four year old will work it out I’m sure. Foxtel does have special remotes for kids that you can select channels for, so cool. So we just need child PC’s that do the same thing. Please don’t tell me you can already get them.

RaeBee you are a snotty twat aren’t you. Weirdly no one under 40 in my household is a member of OLO. And for that you should be grateful or you would have been called “popcorn head” by now.

Fractelle: "There have been extensive arguments on OLO regarding censorship, there are those who will claim that the viewing of porn reduces sexual assault on women. Frankly I find this counter-intuitive."

Apologies to Fractelle, who has heard this all before.

If there is absolutely solid evidence about this either way, I can't find it. But I can summarise what I have found.

Firstly lets dispense with arguments about "I feel". You find lots of studies (most recently this one from the Australia Institute which is probably a trigger for the current filtering debate: http://www.sif.org.au/youthandporn.pdf ), that do surveys, that convincingly show a lot of people don't like porn and would very much prefer it wasn't around, and that conclude as a consequence we should do something about it reducing its availability. That's fine, but it is not what I am talking about here. I want to know if porn has hard edged effects - does it cause more sex crimes, people to die younger, more hospital visits, less income, less kids, more marriage break ups. Once we have hard evidence, we can settle the like/dislike thing at the ballot box.

There is an indisputably strong correlation between viewing porn and committing crimes similar to what is depicted. So, someone who has an insatiable desire for kiddie porn is highly likely to harm a kid. The problem is "correlation doesn't mean causation". An example: it is very likely a person with blue eyes won't be lactose intolerant. But if you think this means eye colour genes overlap lactose genes, you'd be wrong. People with blue eyes tend to come from Nordic stock, while in asians, who are lactose intolerant, blue eyes are very rare. The common cause, for what its worth, seems to be that Nordic people live at high latitudes. Up there it gets dark, cold and hard to grow things for a good part of the year. So they depend on live stock, which means there is a lot of milk available. The low amount of sunlight also gave them fair skin, and blue eyes.

(cont'd...)

(cont'd...)

Similarly, we don't know there is common underlying "urge" that both that drives some men to have sex with kids in spite of the risk of jailed for life and also drives them to seek out porn depicting the same thing. If so, removing the porn would do won't effect it - it might even make the problem worse if porn was used as an alternative outlet.

The next piece of evidence is a non-correlation between how tight a country's porn censorship is, and sex crimes against women. There are countries with very permissive porn laws that have low rates of crimes against women (the Nordic countries in particular - see porn's wikipedia entry). And there are the reverse - countries with tight porn laws and high rates of crimes against women (eg South Africa). There seems to be no hard relationship.

Occasionally you see studies like this one http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/pornography/prngrphy_rape_jp.html , in which Japan varied its porn laws over time. In that case, the tighter the laws the more sex crimes there were. Such studies are rare for obvious reasons, and couple of studies don't prove much.

Possible the most convincing piece of evidence for me is the internet itself. The unfiltered has seen a huge up kick in the availability of porn - probably the biggest every see in the history of our species. The net change in sex crimes over the same period - up slightly in some places (here, I think), down in others (eg the US), but on the whole the changes are almost unmeasurable.

If there is a measurable harmful effect from porn, it is probably porn addition. This has definitely increased with the availability of porn on the internet. Porn triggers a dopamine release. Anything that does that - gambling, drugs, computer games, can trigger addiction. Unlike drug and gambling however the problem is rare and almost never as serious in its consequences.

I won't resile from anything I have put forward and PP don't be so presumptuous. I understand what is being said and the points being put forward. There are some reasonable statements but I will not agree that seeing this stuff on the web helps any society, particularly those of the society with a tendency towards cruelty and depravity. Judging by the news these days, there are some very, very sick people out there.