The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is an agency of the United Nations (UN) dedicated to the improvement and promotion of the condition of children. A recent book published by this agency sheds a troubled light on its motivations and principles.
The general issue of this report seeks to “appreciate what children’s rights mean in a digital environment.”
The reports finds that, “while there is now a widely accepted public imperative to protect children from harm, abuse and violence online, there has been comparatively little consideration of how to empower children as active digital rights-holders.”
The online protection of children requires an assessment of the dangers, but also of the age of the users, which must be estimated, or even verified if necessary. Which requires specific tools, which can be seen as a privacy intrusion.
But the dangers to which children are exposed make this knowledge necessary. This is why the agency admits that verification tools may be necessary. In some cases, they have already been ratified by law in some countries.
The special areas where this protection is needed are: gambling, pornography, online gaming, social media, detection of child pornography.
The section dealing with pornography contains some truly outrageous and unfounded propositions. Let’s judge.
The document begins by asserting that “the term ‘pornography’ has many legal definitions within different jurisdictions, so it is not always clear across the literature that consistent definitions are being used.”
It immediately adds: “Top-ranked digital sexuality education media worldwide accessed by children …may be classified as ‘pornography’ in certain contexts: if it were age restricted, this could deny children access to vital sexuality education materials.”
If such content can be classified in this way, it is difficult to imagine how children could be “deprived” of it. Not to mention the strict right of parents to control the education of their children. UNICEF disregards the responsibility of parents in this area. But the worst is yet to come.
The text would suggest that exposing children to such abominable content is not really dangerous. Indeed, it explains, “There are several different kinds of risks and harms that have been linked to children’s exposure to pornography, but there is no consensus on the degree to which pornography is harmful to children.”
And further, the report hammers the point home: “The evidence is inconsistent, and there is currently no universal agreement on the nature and extent of the harm caused to children by viewing content classified as pornography.”
One might think we are back in the 1970s and the arguments used by apologists for pedophilia, transposed to sex education.
Today these ideas are stigmatized and those who have supported them have been forced to make their mea culpa. It brings to mind certain individuals or certain French newspapers, for example.
Trying to make people believe that children can come out unscathed from such visualizations is truly scandalous and absurd. And it is not the surveys of exposed children cited in the report that may contradict this conclusion. It is too well known that the effects are not immediate, and can take years to instill their poison ... for life.
One day, it is hoped, these promoters of child pornography will have to backtrack, and recognize, as with child abuse, that no serious study can conclude that pornography is harmless, but on the contrary that it is terribly harmful.
The material proposed and endorsed by UNICEF is nothing other than abuse perpetrated on children through a screen. And the harm, without being the same as direct contact, is nevertheless terribly real.
So, this is what the UN’s “children’s” funds are for—to steal the innocence of children.
Note: Strangely, the report is no longer accessible on the UNICEF site, but it can be found on the C-Fam site: http://c-fam.org/wp-content/uploads/Digital-Age-Assurance-Tools-and-Chil...
