Which all sounds rather lovely. A Lib Dem minister plus the PrimeMinsiter had a few parents and children around to number 10 to take a look at a website. Lovely, but it doesn't exactly set the heather alight does it? What of the four ISP's trailed in the media stories, or the issue of opt in/opt out to website controls. Buried mid way through the press release is the following line:
'The commitment from the top four Internet service providers (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin) that all customers will receive an active choice at the point of purchase over whether they want to block adult content on their home Internet or laptops.'
Ahhh, an 'active choice'. Seemingly vague but it does indeed suggest that these companies will have a box on their website or a question during purchase offering parents the opportunity to request a block - although the press release still doesn't define what 'adult content' is. Questions continue to abound.
One of the interesting revelations in this press release was the inclusion of Sarah Tether - this was not a Cameron only, Conservative proposal. It was a coalition proposal. So, what are the Department of Education saying about the event? This is the department that Tether is based in and which has produced the same press release text as Number 10 except the headline has mysteriously changed. They go with: 'Prime Minister welcomes progress on tackling commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood but says more must be done.' So perhaps we start to get to the bottom of the muddle - two departments involved in an event both attempting to say the same thing but spinning the story in a different way. Then we add into the mix the Mothers Union who seem to have a more prominent say in the BBC report - and who - given their inclusion - were obviously briefed before the event and may well have also been briefing the media on how their understood the proposals.
So, we have a set of measures by some members of the Internet industry that still seem incredibly ill-thought out, badly conceived and unlikely to achieve the misplaced aims that the British Government seems to want to achieve. Yet, I am less concerned than I was this time yesterday morning as the changes are perhaps more stupid than scary.
All of which leads to some reflections on the evidence-base for the "sexualisation" which seems to be the driver for these campaigns and policies...
Ignoring any social thinking, the evidence of law is that before 1824 there was no serious attempt to police an age of consent and marriages happened at 10 or younger - the separation of sex from other offences against the person that occurred with changes made by the 1885 Act and the eventual complete separation in the 1956 SOA had the effect of drawing attention to the nature of sex and sexuality as separate from (and somehow more morally wrong) than other offences against the person in the common law tradition... a consequence of which is the insertion of the "won't somebody think of the children" mentality.
Apparently the moral campaigners do think of the children - rather disturbingly they seem to think of them in sexual terms, which given that most children won't think of themselves in that way until they hit the hormonal drive of puberty says rather more about the mind-set of the 'moral' than about the children themselves.
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