I thank my colleague, the member for Yellowhead for that excellent question and for his consistent and excellent service in this place.
The member is quite right that we are living in an age where there is so much information out there. More and more, there is awareness and education around the importance of consent and the importance of recognizing equal human dignity. However, there is more misinformation, or media in different forms, that gives wrong impressions about these same questions.
I spoke about the prevalence of violent pornography and the fact that children, young boys as well as girls, are accessing this material and it is shaping their perceptions about what normal and healthy sexual relationships look like. We have on the one hand increasing information about the importance of consent, but on the other hand we have increasing misinformation, and that misinformation is something people are accessing at a very young age. It is leading them to associate the feelings of arousal with seeing very violent images.
This is a very real and significant problem. I would encourage members, as we move forward in these areas where we all agree on improving the mechanisms for reporting and addressing harassment, that we also think about this question of socialization, of how young boys in particular can come to think that things are acceptable that are not acceptable as a result of the media they are consuming.
I know it is a difficult issue. It raises questions about how we would engage with the Internet. It raises questions about, perhaps, civil liberties, but when we are talking about children it is a different matter. Children really have no idea the effect this material has on them when they consume it initially. Maybe they start out very young, simply curious about what this whole thing is all about, but it shapes their perceptions about what is normal and acceptable, and it has significant social consequences.
The issues raised by Motion No. 47, but also recognized by a recent status of women committee report, are issues we should have the courage to confront in this Parliament.