Page 6002 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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have the right to associate with whomever they like, that they have the right to view, read, listen, or talk about any subject? What is the result of telling children that they have the right to privacy and saying that their parents, as a corollary to this, have no rights in the area themselves?
Let me tell you a story I heard a couple of weeks ago. Someone told me about a good friend of hers who has a 12-year-old daughter. The parents came home and the 12-year-old was in bed with a 16-year-old boy. The parents had something to say about this and the child said, "You cannot tell me who I can associate with". The word "associate" was used. That is the word that is used in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I am hearing of more and more cases where children are telling their parents, "You cannot tell me when I can go out; who I can go out with; when I can come home". I have heard of children threatening their parents with reporting them to the police. This is certainly not suggesting that children should be abused. But it goes a lot further than that when you teach children rights but not responsibilities.
When I talk about child abuse, is there something that we can do about child abuse? Yes, there is, in the ACT; but unfortunately, as an Assembly, we have abrogated our responsibility to do that. The proliferation of pornography has an effect on children. The juvenile squads in Victoria and Queensland have both indicated that in excess of 90 per cent of the children that come into contact with those squads have watched pornography. There are many forms of problems that pornography causes. On the children themselves, directly, it suggests a way of behaviour, a way of acting, a way of relating to members of the opposite sex that is unreal, that is false. Your children see these things fairly regularly. While there may not be pornography on the television, we certainly see a similar situation.
We also understand, from looking at the research, that with an increase in pornography we have an increase in rape and sexual offences. Some men, particularly, are driven to acting out what they see. Some men become addicted to pornography. Some men commit rape, child abuse and child molestation, and, of course, have far less regard for women than would be useful in a sane society.
One of the other difficulties that we have in Australia is that so many children have reported that they feel that there is no hope for the future. Why is this? It is because of what we tell them in society. We tell them things such as that there are going to be catastrophic, environmentally destructive, global eliminating problems out there. That is not to say that there are not problems. I have spoken in this house, in detail, on what is called the enhanced greenhouse effect which, when you look at the
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