More than laws required to deal with pornography

 

Whenever a law is enacted to make something ‘illegal’, there is a ripple effect of people who attempt to circumnavigate it to earn profits. This is by making the banned products available through backdoor channels. I don’t know how that would work since we already have a big problem with the ease of availability of sexually explicit content online, some accessible to children.

I doubt if just enacting a law would really help since it takes more than legislation to control habits and addictions such as those that involve consumption of explicit material.  Most of this boils down to parenting. We must ask ourselves questions on how children access these materials. Some of it comes as a result of them having gadgets, and some cheap tablets that only need WiFi access.

It, therefore, goes beyond just enacting laws as there is always how people go around legal barriers. You may deal with access to these materials, but how would you deal with problems such as addiction to pornography. Addiction is a whole other scenario — being an indication of an underlying problem. Most people struggling with some addictions that I encounter always have something they are trying to run away from, of which some may resort to pornography for the much-needed reliefs.

It is imperative to note that the controls may to an extent help in dealing with the problem. But when coming up with such controls, there has to be a strong element of parenting that has to come into play. Like how are we bringing up our children? How are we preparing them for life? Are we conscious to what they are exposed to? Are we conscious of the world we live in and the realities of our technological age?

While I agree there is a role stringent laws can play, we need to be conscious of the dynamism of people’s behaviour and the desire to adapt to change. Ahead of the technological advancements, people still accessed pornographic material through magazines – though not as much.

From my experience,  parenting is the most ideal way to control such; people who have addiction problems have early childhood trauma. There are those with history of molestation and because of those wounds, they choose to take up pornography as way to self-medicate.

For effectiveness of this law, there has to be holistic approach to dealing with the menace of pornography. BY THE STAR