Smartphones should be banned in schools because too many children are using them to watch pornography or take inappropriate pictures or videos of girls, MPs have been told.
The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has been examining the Relationships, Sex, and Health Education (RSHE) curriculum and as part of that review, it heard from a number of experts and campaign groups on Wednesday.
Lucy Marsh, from the Family Education Trust charity, said children growing up in the smartphone era were subjected to a highly sexualised environment.
Marsh said: “Until we actually address the fact that children are watching porn, we’re never going to solve the problem of violence against women because while children have got access to smartphones they are going to be able to view it.”
She added: “Should children have access to smartphones and should they be in schools for that? For that, I would say the answer is no. I don’t think smartphones should be in schools.”
Marsh said the government should look at completely banning smartphones in schools and said it “would solve some of the problems of things like children being filmed getting changed or being filmed in toilets or upskirting.”
Upskirting—the practice of taking sexually inappropriate photographs in public—became illegal in April 2019 and offenders, including juveniles, can be arrested and potentially sent to prison if convicted.
Asked if the current RSHE curriculum does enough to help tackle misogyny and violence against women and girls, Marsh said: “Not at all. We’re seeing huge damage being done with children watching porn.”
She said: “Schools are not addressing the harm this does to children in being able to form healthy relationships when they’re adults.”
MP Raised Concerns About ‘Age-Inappropriate’ Lessons
The review came after Conservative MP Miriam Cates claimed some pupils had been given RSHE lessons in school which were “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising, and inaccurate.”Earlier this week the Children’s Commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, published research that found acts of sexual violence commonly found in pornography were referenced in half of police interview transcripts of child-on-child sex abuse cases.
De Souza said: “For too long we have brushed the issue of pornography under the carpet as awkward, uncomfortable, or too difficult to solve, but we cannot shy away from discussing the nature, scale, and impacts of online pornography.”
She added: “My last report showed just how early in their lives children are seeing violent pornography and the way this often distorts their views on relationships and sex. What this compelling new evidence now shows is that these acts commonly taking place in pornography are also occurring in terrible cases of child sexual abuse and violence.”
De Souza made a series of recommendations, including that, “RSHE teaching should take a safeguarding-first approach and be overseen by the designated safeguarding lead in each school.”
Tanya Carter, from Safe Schools Alliance UK, said schools needed to educate parents about “the sheer volume of pornography online.”
She told the committee on Wednesday: “At Safe Schools we think smartphones absolutely should not be in schools. Once you’ve got smartphones in schools, every child in that school is only as protected as the least protected child in that school.”
RSHE Should Not Push a ‘World View’
Carter said she wanted to see a “public inquiry” into the RSHE curriculum and said the object of the lessons should be to educate the children and not for a group of adults to push their “world view.”She said: “Absolutely we want children to have education that benefits them, but some of the materials we’ve seen it’s really not beneficial to children.”
The government chose to make the teaching of RSHE compulsory in all secondary schools from September 2020.
“As legislators and as parents we have a duty to protect the innocence of our children,” she added.
