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Cyberporn Panics: Policing Pre/Pubescent Peeping
Abstract
This paper examines the social values and attitudes underlying current debates surrounding Internet regulation, pornography and children. It undercuts existing arguments about the advantages or disadvantages of currently available regulatory devices and instead, questions the assumptions underlying the push for such mechanisms. The paper proposes that cyberporn panics are primarily grounded in adult anxieties relating to parents’ inability to control both technology - particularly the Internet – and their technologically literate children. These panics are also predicated on the social construction of the child as ‘innocent’. Actions by parents, moral custodians and governments to purportedly protect children by regulating the Internet are often, in effect, disguised attempts to maintain the socially constructed divisions between children, adolescents and adults. These divisions are fast becoming impossible to maintain and moreover, are questionable in twenty-first century societies of diversity and plurality whose mass media are already predominantly sexualised.
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