What’s Current: Growth in number of young sexual offenders in Australia linked to porn consumption

sexting

Sexual assault among young people is on the rise in Australia. Experts point to porn consumption.

Alan Hawe killed his wife and three sons with a hatchet and knives — stop making excuses for him. Suzanne Breen writes:

“The eulogising reached such dizzy heights last weekend, that I wondered if Alan Hawe was being canonised along with Mother Teresa. You would think that after all the campaigns that Women’s Aid, and others, have run that more journalists would have by now copped onto the fact that men who hurt women and children don’t have ‘domestic abuser’ tattooed across their foreheads.”

When women are sexually assaulted on long-haul flights, airlines have no procedures to address the problem.

Elizabeth Smart is challenging the way the Mormon Church talks about women and sex:

“‘You’re like this beautiful fence,’ she remembers being told in class after she’d returned home. ‘And you hammer these nails in, and then every time you have sex with someone else, it’s like you’re hammering in another nail. And you can take them out, you can repent of them, but the holes are still there.’

‘I just remember thinking, This is terrible. Do they not realize I’m sitting in class? Do they not realize that I’m listening to what they’re saying? Those are terrible analogies. No one should use them, period. Especially for someone who’s been raped, they’ve already felt these feelings of worthlessness, of filth, of just… of just being so crushed, and then to hear a teacher come back and say, ‘Nobody wants you now’… You just think, I should just die right now.’”

Susan Cox

Susan Cox is a feminist writer and academic living in the United States. She teaches in Philosophy.