Parents can never relax their vigilance

John Gummer
TME NATIONAL Viewers and Listeners Association, made famous by rs Mary Whitehouse, has recently suggested that the Government is changing its attitude to censorship. There are now new voices calling for some brake on the free-for-all attitude towards pornography. This issue has always been controversial: there was widespread antagonism when Mrs Whitehouse first stood up to be counted. Even an establishment figure like Sir Hugh Carlton Greene let it be known that while he was running the BBC she should not appear unless producers had got special permission. The fascism of the liberal reaction was remarkable.
Yet their victory over the old ways was relatively recent. Even in my lifetime I can remember the Lord Chamberlain controlling what was allowed on the stage, the prosecution of Lady Chatterley, the publisher's voluntary excision of two passages from Gide's If it Die, and the row over Last Exit to Brooklyn. Since then, one by one, the barriers have come down. Indeed few believe that there are any real restraints at all today. That accounts for the surprise that the MEP Tom Spenser could be accused by the press of importing a video which was legal in France but illegal here. Most imagined there were no such products!
For some time, it has hardly been respectable to support any form of censorship. It is still the view that censorship on exclusively sexual grounds is inadmissible. Only with the growing . evidence of ,the effect of the . portrayal of violence or paedophilia has this begun to change. It is the violence, the under-age performers, the threat to children, and the lack of consent which has led people to demand action.
Catholics have always had a different view. We have believed that the community has a duty to set the best before its young and discourage the worst. We have thought it right for the state not to be neutral in these matters but to encourage young people to see sex in the proper context of love and marriage. We have been particularly concerned to ensure that young people who do not seek out pornography should not have it thrust upon them.
Yet the issue is now more acute than ever. The problem is that parents — even good Catholic parents — are less and less well equipped to protect their children. The sheer extent of the material on offer in every newsagent makes it extremely hard to advise or even monitor. Nor is it the overtly "adult" publications which are most damaging. It is the magazines designed for teenagers which are particularly pernicious in the way they assume sexual activity even among the very young. The standards and values which animate most of them run wholly counter to those which we seek to inculcate. A permissive culture is taken for granted and young people are made to feel excluded if they adopt any other stance.
EVEN MORE difficult to handle is the Internet. In most homes, children are much more computer proficient than their parents. Many adults have no idea what material is available from the simplest of web-searches. Type in "sex" and literally hundreds of thousands of entries come flashing back —the word is hardly difficult to spell. Even without access to a credit card, the most graphic of material is readily available to any young person who is prepared to press the over 18 entry button. There is not even the restraint of embarassment. No shopkeeper to beard, no queue to join.
So before we get on the campaign trail against pornography, we would all do well to become more familiar with the means by which it comes most readily into our own homes. No outside restriction will replace the need for true parental guidance — being there'and knowing enough may be increasingly difficult, but it is the only way.