Censorship: No Sex Education Please, We're Filtered

www.nhs.uk

The #CensoredUK hashtag, spearheaded by the Sex and Censorship group [PornPanic], has been drawing attention to some of the unexpected sites that end up being blocked when internet providers buckle to government demands to censor "adult content".

Nine out of 10 homes will have porn filters on their computers by the end of January, after a Government deal with four big internet providers. Web giants TalkTalk, Virgin, Sky and BT, have all agreed to introduce network filters which can block inappropriate content from all the online devices within the home.

Across several mobile internet providers, however, harmless sex and relationships education sites are being blocked by their web filters. In my experience, the sexual health charity Brook, for example, has turned up on website checkers as being default blocked. But this is plainly not adult content, so why?

...I've said it many times before, and I'll keep saying it. Sexual health is not "adult content". Lumping important (and for many young people, the only) sexual health advice they will have access to in with porn is a mistake. I've always supported voluntary blocks installed by parents on a home by home basis, but phone and internet providers need to understand that doing this for everyone as a default is not their job. More to the point, politicians need to understand that making internet providers do so is not the Government's job.

There is also a concern for LGBT teens, some of whom will not have the support of their families and may have little access to safe, reliable information about sex and sexuality. What about them?

Dr Brooke Magnanti, Daily Telegraph.

Jane Fae writes on companies that are blocking gay websites.

• Sex & Censorship - On the UK Internet block-list.

Update: BBC Newsnight report on how the new ISP porn filters are not filtering some hardcore porn, but are blocking sites about sex education, domestic abuse and rape crisis helplines...

Upadte2: Gay Star News and Pink News realise this is happening after it's happened and they've been sent a press release about it saying it's happened to London Friend, saying they've been blocked by TalkTalk!

Sex Panic: Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children?!

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or a group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panics is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself...

Folk Devils & Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen (1972).

Ban the internet! Ban electricity! Ban children! Ban Page 3! Ban lads' mags! Ban the body! Ban sex! Ban twerking! Ban wanking! Ban fun! Ban fag packets! Ban cheap booze! Ban legal highs! Ban video games! Ban ask.fm! Ban Twitter! Ban travellers! Ban benefits! Ban squatting! Ban gay! Ban the niqab! Ban the BBC! Ban Stoli! Ban Sochi! Ban Russia! Ban rational thought! Ban brains! Ban the bum! BAN THE BAN!
Brass Eye Paedophilia special, Channel 4, 2001 - a satire on media-driven hysteria and moral panics.
You gotta laugh to keep from crying...

Update: More Pornballs - Compulsive users of porn show the same signs of addiction in their brain as those hooked on booze or drugs, according to researchers The Daily Mail.

• Sex & Censorship conference organised by @PornPanic, London, Monday September 23rd.