LONDON — Several government watchdog organizations and officials in the U.K., including England’s new “Children’s Commissioner,” are currently conducting a campaign to address reports of an “epidemic of sexual harassment” in public and private schools, with much of the blame placed on online porn.
Last week, a report by Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) revealed that many school-age Britons considered that “sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are such a routine part of their daily lives [that] they don’t see any point in challenging or reporting it.”
Dame Rachel de Souza, an educator appointed last December by the Boris Johnson administration, told British media on Monday, in reaction to the report, that “we can’t ignore that, nor should we.”
However, instead of addressing the centuries-old British culture of sexualized hazing in schools, or parental responsibilities, or the need for a program of non-shame-based sex education, de Souza claimed that “one area I’m clear on is that online hardcore pornography warps boys’ expectations of normal relationships and normalizes behaviors that girls are then expected to accept, and it’s just too easy for children to access.”
A Conservative Catholic Who Won't Condemn Corporal Punishment
De Souza received a Catholic education at Jesus College, Oxford and served as a principal of the Ormiston Victory Academy, where the curriculum is based on “British values.” She was appointed by the Tory government of Boris Johnson and immediately caused controversy by refusing to join her peers in Scotland and Wales in pledging a commitment to banning corporal punishment in schools.
Johnson, her political boss, is an alum of Eton, a private school with numerous documented incidents of sexual abuse of students dating back to the Middle Ages, long before the advent of “internet pornography.” Most recently, around the time Johnson appointed de Souza as “Children’s Commissioner,” an Eton teacher was jailed for sexual offenses against his pupils.
On Monday, de Souza called for enforced age verification to access adult content by claiming that “most children who have seen pornography say the first time it was accidental. In the real world, adults wouldn’t leave something dangerous or inappropriate lying around for children to stumble upon. Why should the internet be different?”
Christian Groups Praise de Souza, Abstinence
The Christian Institute’s Deputy Director for Public Affairs Simon Calvert, according to his organization’s news outlet, praised de Souza and “blamed the sex education industry for being ‘obsessed with explicitness and hostile to the Christian sexual ethic.’”
“If kids are being told in school that using pornography is normal and healthy, as many sex education professionals say, how can we be surprised when they use it and then try to act it out?” said Calvert.
Calvert urged Ofsted to “ensure that teaching includes opportunities to explain the benefits of self-control and marriage.”
However, even The Guardian — a nominally progressive outlet that regularly stigmatizes sex workers and makes sweeping, inaccurate statements about the adult industry — reported that “experts warned that blanket porn blocks may be neither effective nor helpful,” citing Ruth Eliot, a sexual violence prevention specialist at the School of Sexuality Education.
“Abstinence-based education around sexuality has never worked,” Eliot told the Guardian. “Young people choose to watch porn as a result of a perfectly natural and normal curiosity about sexuality. Instead of policing that, we should upskill them on how to experience porn in a way that makes them understand the cultural context and that it’s not an instruction manual.”
Main Image: Boris Johnson appointee Dame Rachel de Souza
