A New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the impacts of pornography on mental, emotional, and physical health has begun hearings. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
The committee is reviewing 79 submissions from the community, including from the Catholic Women’s League NSW, the Council of Catholic School Parents, and Collective Shout.
Representing the CWL NSW, Deirdre Little told the inquiry the organisation regarded all forms of pornography as harmful and that “so-called ‘standard, non-violent pornography’ is not harmless.”
She said that “children are immersed in increasingly sexually explicit media,” which may contribute to the normalisation of pornography in Australia more broadly.
“In a home where there is repeated exposure to even non-violent, standard pornography, it is associated with reduced valuation of marriage regarding extra-marital affairs as normal, associated with mounting use to addiction, associated with escalation to more deviant pornography, the trivialisation of rape and behavioural aggression,” Dr Little said.
Catherine Garrett-Jones, Executive Director of the Council of Catholic School Parents, noted the role of parents as first educators of their children in protecting their children from the dangers of pornography.
Ms Garrett-Jones highlighted the problem of educating parents who are not engaged with what is happening with their kids.
“We can preach to the converted all we want, but what we’re really concerned about is that segment of parents who are not engaged,” she said.
She also said that from the survey of parents conducted by CCSP, there was clear support for further government regulation around access, commenting that this stemmed from “parents’ own feelings of inadequacy around how to manage social media [because] it is growing at a pace faster than they can understand.”
Collective Shout’s Managing Director Melissa Tankard-Reist spoke at the inquiry, echoing her organisation’s beliefs about stopping the sexualisation and degradation of women in media.
FULLS TORY
NSW holds first public hearing into pornography inquiry (By Tara Kennedy and Monica Doumit, The Catholic Weekly)
