Exclusive: Survey finds growing number ‘neglecting responsibilities’ or ‘damaging relationships’ as a result
Experts are urgently calling for a national strategy on pornography as a total of 53% of therapists surveyed by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) said they had seen a rise in people seeking help for problematic pornography use that was interfering with their life or driving them to seek out more extreme content.
“Not an anti-porn crusade, that’s absolutely not it, but actually understanding that for some people, a significant number of people, porn does lead to harms. And how do we actually begin to do something and address that?”
Shining a light on a problem is good, directing people to resources where they can seek help is also fine. The problem I have with this article is that it steers into policy with statements like:
and the ambiguous claim that:
What role are they implying that government should have in any of this? By and large it seems like governments generally tend to respond to “addiction problems” with some form of ban. Anti-porn legislation seems to amount to poorly drafted, ill-considered blunt instruments that also seem very likely to cause more problems than the issues they claim to address (and often backed by dubious special interests that clearly have other agendas). They present the claim that it’s:
But the article doesn’t mention any other kind of action or involvement the government might take in response to the problem.
Articles that cover subjects as controversial and consequential as this should be especially careful and informative in the way they discuss them otherwise they run the risk of merely fanning the flames.
[Edited for clarity]
Very well put. Thank you.