30 Jul 2007 etbe   » (Master)

Porn vs Rape

Chris Samuel blogs about a plan to censor porn from the Internet in Australia. According to the ZDNet article the Fundamentalist Christian party Family First wants a national porn filter to protect children.

However there is strong evidence to suggest that the incidence of rape decreases as the availability of pornography increases. Access to porn prevents rapes!

The question is whether protecting people (mostly women and children) from rape is more important than protecting the strange and unusual (by the standards of modern Australian society) religious beliefs of a minority of people who oppose porn.

The current research on porn vs rape is based on comparing different regions of the US with different levels of Internet access. It would be more accurate if a scientific test could be performed in a controlled environment. The US has the largest number of prisoners of any country and the largest proportion of the population in prison of any first-world country and rape is common in prison. It would be easy to grant access to porn to one cell block of a prison and deny access to another and then record the incidence of reported rape (currently in the US porn is restricted in prisons and masturbation in prison is a crime). The results of such research could be used to devise government policy with the aim of protecting people from rape. Of course that would require compassion - something that’s extremely uncommon in politicians particularly the ones that claim to be Christian.

Some people are requesting the creation of Christian Porn - so Porn and Christianity don’t have to be opposed. The same site has an interesting page Masturbation: God’s Great Gift to Us. Now if all those rapists could be encouraged to watch Christian Porn and take advantage of God’s Great Gift then the world would be a better place.

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Syndicated 2007-07-30 09:00:53 from etbe

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