Consent is not taught in schools as part of the SPHE program.
It should be.

Doesn’t blaming pornography seem like a great scapegoat, for parents who don’t teach their children to be compassionate, moral and decent people? How come it seemingly turns certain children into rapists, and with others it has no effect?

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Pornography may well be a contributing factor, but I think that if we rush off to update the nanny software on our kid’s computers, we may be deluding ourselves into a false sense of security. We need to examine this from every single possible angle, because it’s too serious a problem to have only one simple elegant solution.

Another thing – nanny software must have come some way since I was a kid, because I always treated it like a standard joke.

The rape crisis centre may be right about pornography, especially of the violent kind, being a contributor to societally undesirable sexual behaviour amongst minors but I hope they are not condoning Chinese style censorship of the Internet and a return to the dominance of the Irish Censorship Board. My opinion is the following: If you have internet technology of any kind and children in your house, ensure you use parental controls. It is complete parenting negligence to shrug your shoulders, declare yourself a luddite and allow your children access an unrestricted web. It’s paramount to allowing your kids to wander the streets of the city centre at 2 am. Yes children are technologically savvy these days but you are buying them this technology therefore it is your responsibility to educate yourself in it’s applications and how to appropriately restrict it. It’s fine for organisations to point at pornography as a culprit but utterly unproductive if they are not even hinting at a solution. Parental culpability must be the first step. Internet pornography is here to stay.

Not surprised to hear this. I would be concerned most about the normalisation of rape, humiliation and torture depicted in a lot of porn from the USA in particular. Part of the same societal degeneration that gave the world Abu ghraib.

Just thought that I would also mention that it’s a little unfair to feature Tramco’s picture featured in such an article. Last time I looked, it was not a hot bed for underage sexual assault..

I’m not so sure if pornography is more available, it was always there, the internet existed when I was growing up and I’m pretty sure it had porn on it then too. Even in school it was widely available and that was a good while back. I remember the scummy kids seemed to be doing a roaring trade selling the stuff, downloaded movies, copied DVDs, stolen magazines. This report may be about 15 years out of date if that’s what it’s outing this down to. Are they even aware of the consensual things that kids are getting up to? Fortunately, some kids talk to their parents about what goes on, that’s when you can positively influence behaviour

The correlation of pornography and sex crimes has been thoroughly disproven by serious studies, yet it keeps popping up in political discourse. In any case, a one year increase means nothing, it could easily be a blip

Where are you off to showing a picture of Tramco? Talk about putting your hand out to be slapped. This is second time you have used Tramco for such an article. It’s called slander and it’s illegal.