Harm, childhood and appropriate media content: an ongoing debate

We live in an era of contested conceptualisations of childhood. On the one hand, the commercial imperative of contemporary capitalism has expanded into marketing for and to children. On the other hand, the predominant view of childhood as a natural, universal and biologically inherent period of human development, imagined as an age of innocence where the child is vulnerable to the threat of deviant sexuality, means that we experience a nervous dialectic in which children are held to be ‘naturally’ innocent yet, at the same time, implicated in dangerous sexuality. This means that rather than seeing them as humans going through a complex and contradictory maturation process, we posit children as inherently pure, yet easily corrupted by exposure to explicit image material (Kleinhans, 2004, p 72).

However, the assumed harmful influence of pornography on children goes back to a long and still ongoing tradition of media effects, and has been exacerbated with the advent and unprecedented proliferation of online pornography. Children need to be protected from harmful content, which includes pornographic content. We live, the argument goes, in a culture saturated and depraved by uncontrolled sexuality, in which childhood innocence is debauched by media and consumer culture within which the availability of sexual information to children is rarely treated as positive. Alongside a growing acceptance that young viewers interpret pornography in complex ways and claims that media ‘effects’ are simplistic and overly deterministic – especially when pornography is also seen as having desirable effects, as in the case of challenging restrictive sexual norms and offering positive expressions of non-heterosexual sexualities – there is a need to be cautious about the harmful effects associated with pornography (Flood, 2007). The ubiquity of children's encounters with internet pornography has been discussed by various researchers and institutions, in different national contexts (Freeman-Longo, 2000; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2001; Thornburgh and Lin, 2002; NetRatings Australia, 2005; McKee et al, 2008; Ey and Cupit, 2011; among others).

There is a grey area on the public agenda that covers child sexuality and child pornography, which are, however, separate issues.