Source : the age
The pernicious influence of pornography and social media algorithms in driving gendered violence has been examined at an urgent round table, as Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek says the nation needs “to do something different” to combat soaring rates of sexual assault.
The Minns government convened the urgent round table on Friday after a series of shocking alleged sexual assaults by Sydney schoolboys, bringing together dozens of experts for a three-hour meeting to address the spread of sexual violence and misogyny among young people.
The allegations include three students of Scots College, an affluent school in Sydney’s east, who were charged with raping a 14-year-old girl, and the death of a teenage girl from the northern beaches suspected to be caused by sexual choking.
Full Stop Australia chief executive Karen Bevan said participants strongly agreed on the need to work more closely with schools around respectful relationships and consent education.
Hours earlier, acting Premier and Education Minister Prue Car said that adding to the curriculum would not fix the crisis.
Bevan acknowledged there was “real curriculum fatigue” but said that delivering the right information to schoolchildren was essential.
A communique shared after the round table on Friday afternoon said participants had examined how online environments and algorithms were having an increasingly influential role in “shaping harmful attitudes towards gender, relationships and consent, and are contributing to sexual violence among young people”.
Bevan said that while there was broad agreement about the need to address sexually violent aspects of pornography, “TikTok didn’t invent sexual assault. Instagram didn’t create harmful versions of masculinity. So we need to make sure that we work online, but we have to also work offline.”
The round table was the first step in the Minns government’s broader agenda to address sexual-based violence and would feed into the development of the NSW Sexual Violence Plan, expected to be released in 2027, the communique said.
Before the round table, Plibersek said the influence of the internet was bleeding into the real world and having insidious effects on young people.
“Growing rates of sexual violence, where both the perpetrator and the victim are under the age of 18 – we need to do something different,” she said.
Car condemned comments made by federal Nationals leader Matt Canavan, after he claimed respectful-relationships education was pushing an “anti-boy ideology”.
Premier Chris Minns, speaking from Mumbai where he is part of a four-day trade delegation to India, threw his support behind calls for users to quit social media algorithms.
He threw his support behind Plibersek’s push for Australia to look “very seriously” at adopting a UK-style ban on depicting strangulation or suffocation in pornography.
“I am worried, like a lot of people, that this graphic, violent imagery is being transmitted to young minds without any context or understanding what it means, often before they’ve got any kind of maturity to deal with the implications of seeing it,” he said.
With Michael McGowan
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.
Max Maddison is a state political reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.
