The news at least five Canberra schools have been caught up in a porn sharing website scandal in which explicit images of girls and young women are hunted down like Pokemon Go characters highlights a battle society appears to be rapidly losing.
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On the one hand millions of dollars are being spent to persuade young Australians sexual exploitation, sexualised violence and the abuse of women and girls is never acceptable.
On the other, a billion-dollar pornography industry, which is never further away than any teenager's mobile phone, is normalising such behaviours with easy access to imagery that would once have been restricted to X-rated cinemas in the seediest parts of St Kilda and Kings Cross.
Unless broader society makes a serious effort to condemn grubby and sordid behaviours whenever they raise their ugly head this is a battle we are going to lose.
The saddest part is that the casualties in this war are our children who, because the internet has made pornography such a pervasive presence, are constantly at risk of being persuaded aberrant, and in many cases, abhorrent, behaviours are acceptable.
As early as 1975 US academic and author, S. Brownmiller, was writing: "Pornography has been so thickly glossed over with a patina of chic in the name of verbal freedom and sophistication that important distinctions between freedom of political expression [a democratic necessity], honest sex education for children [a societal good] and ugly smut [the deliberate devolution of the role of women through obscene, distorted depictions] have been hopelessly confused."
A 1990s NSW government report was even more succinct: "Businesses spend billions on advertising in the belief the media can and do influence behaviour. We support and encourage the arts in the belief they have the capacity to uplift and enhance society. Yet we are expected to believe that increasing tide of pornography does not affect attitudes to women."
That tide has, since the advent of the internet, become a tsunami with many of the causal links between smut and rape, child molestation, domestic violence and sexual harassment first identified in the print and film era now reaching crisis levels.
The latest porn sharing web ring is not just a problem for the unfortunate girls whose images are being traded like bubble gum cards. It is part of a broader social malaise, which is teaching our sons it is OK to demean and humiliate women while telling our daughters it is normal to be used and abused.
It is not enough to say the genie is out of the bottle and this can't be stopped. Clearly there is much work to be done educating our young men that such objectification of women is potentially very damaging to its victims and has no place in our society.
