There are more than 52 million pornographic web pages registered in Britain – making it the third-biggest host of internet porn in the world.
MetaCert/The Sunday Times

In the UK five prisons have been dedicated solely to housing sex offenders. The rate of convictions has doubled in a decade, and there are thought to be a further 50,000 people at large viewing illegal images of child abuse on the web. These men were not born monsters. The typical trajectory of an online paedophile begins when a man looking at legal porn finds himself aroused by images of young-looking girls (many supposedly “18 and legal” sites feature girls who look prepubescent). Click, click, click – the man, previously unaware of his own desires, goes from grown women to “barely legal”, to child porn. Around 15% of men who look at child porn go on to commit physical abuse. If they are found out society will never trust them again. They may lose their jobs, families and friends. This is what internet porn does for men: “grooms them into criminality, abuse and damned lives”. (Janice Turner, The Times, London).

This raises the issue of free will. Looking at child porn is a choice that most of us don’t make and, if we did, would find grubby and distasteful. Epicureans, with more wholesome and useful things to do do not waste their time on it.

The above article deals with child porn, but I can’t understand why, in the name of so-called “freedom of speech”, we allow any form of porn on the internet, (where, incidentally, it is watched by a majority of young kids). Have we lost our moral bearings altogether? Or is porn supported so stoutly by influential men and politicians who partake themselves? Why else should this stuff not be totally banned?