You might remember that I cited an early (childhood) exposure to pornography as the primary cause of the behaviours I would later become guilty of as an adult.  I can explain how I believe the early exposure to pornography negatively affected my sexual development and learned behaviours from many different perspectives and I stand by it.

I have therefore followed the Government’s plans to enforce a pornography age filter with interest.

I think the general objective is a very positive one.  If it were possible to simply apply an age filter to pornographic websites, thereby restricting access to adults only, then I would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Government’s plans because this is a very important problem for our society to address.

Unfortunately I don’t believe the Government’s plan will work at all.  The problem is that the filter they intend to enforce will be trivial to subvert.  The best we can hope for is that it goes some way toward preventing accidental exposure to pornography online.  But a determined child who wants to view pornography will be able to bypass the filter without any trouble at all.

Another issue is that only the large pornography websites will be forced to sign up to the plan.  But pornography is available from many sources, and the Government cannot possibly hope to filter them all.  So it will still be very easy for a child to access pornography – even accidentally – via the many unfiltered sources online.

Here’s the issue: I wanted to view the pornography when I was a child.  I was a young boy, and of course I was interested in how adults have sex.  This is natural.  But you don’t know when you’re a child that indulging your interests and viewing this material can be damaging for you.  That’s why we need to protect children in the first place: they are not ready to make their own decisions in this regard.

When I was a child there was at least a fairly effective natural filter: pornography was hard to get.  And, even if you did come across it, it was even harder to find an ongoing source of it and it was practically impossible to distribute, at least for a child.

So the opportunities to go down the wrong path in this regard were limited for most boys my age when I was a child.

But today, with the widespread availability of pornography on the internet, I am genuinely worried that we are going to be manufacturing adults with unhelpful sexual interests like bottles on a Production line.

And the Government’s answer to this problem is not going to work.

This Government plan is dangerous because, in my view, it creates the potential for complacency in parents.

Parents will suddenly be under the impression that their children are protected online, and I fear that many of them will relax their attitude to supervision as a result.

Supervision of a child’s activity online is difficult.  It takes effort, it takes time, it takes determination and it can be a challenging source of conflict between the child and the parent.

For this reason I think that many parents will be relieved to feel that they can rely on the Government’s age filter as a solution.  Who doesn’t want to avoid difficult interactions with their child?

There are many things I look forward to as my own child grows up and becomes a young man.  But managing and supervising his online activity is not one of them.  In fact I am dreading it.  Striking the right balance will be very difficult, and it’s a challenge I don’t look forward to.

But one thing’s for sure, I will not rely on the Government’s age filter to bail me out.  Anyone with a little technical expertise can see straight away why it won’t work and how easy it will be to subvert.

Unfortunately technical expertise is not commonly found and most parents will be in the position of blindly trusting the Government’s solution with a kind of naive expectation that if the Government installed it, surely it can be relied upon.

Unfortunately technical expertise is not only rare among the general public, it’s rare among our own Government MPs as well.

But the children know what to do with technology.  They’ll know far more than most parents.  Make no mistake about that!