Health committee  Could I add something?

Health committee  I very quickly want to talk about education of children. At the moment, I think sex education is a “thing”. When kids get to grade 6, they know know that it's coming, Sometimes the kids are separated, so a male teacher teaches the boys and a female teacher teaches the girls. I th

Health committee  Low self-esteem? I'm not sure about that.

Health committee  Well, low self-esteem primarily comes from how you're treated by your parents. That's the critical relationship that will determine your self-esteem. How your parents tell you you are is how you will believe yourself to be, so you internalize what you hear and that voice becomes

Health committee  I think the critical developmental point here is the teenage brain. In the teenage brain, the frontal lobe, which is responsible for all the decision-making, weighing the pros and cons of risks, that type of thing, is functioning.... Let's just say the amygdalic system—which is w

Health committee  That's very difficult for me to answer, because I realize that there are lots and lots of different opinions, some based on cultural values. I mean, parents have lots of reasons for doing that. To me, it's part of health, part of health development, part of respecting and protect

Health committee  There are short-term and long-term perspectives on this. The long-term perspective I would see is to simply change the acceptability of a lot of this. Clearly, everyone around this table is not accepting of any kind of harmful or degrading effects on children, but I think general

Health committee  I think that would be an excellent idea. Now, bear in mind that a lot of the sex education that children get has now been pulled from the curriculum through parents' concerns and so on. Certainly it's still within the Ontario curriculum, which is what I know best. There's a lot o

Health committee  Quite possibly. What happens is that if children aren't taught by credible sources—it could be parents, it could be teachers, or it could be whoever the person is who could do that—then children will learn things on the playground that are often very unreliable. I've had teenager

Health committee  That's illegal, yes. As for the legal pornography, I can't answer that question. I don't know what would be classified as legal or illegal. As my colleagues have said, the actual definition of pornography is so hard to obtain. I don't know whether there would be any kind of set

Health committee  I think, because of this underground pornography network, because you have to upload your own images, that if you haven't gotten them from somewhere, you do create them. Anecdotally, while talking to the police whom I train, and social workers and emergency room doctors, I feel I

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  I'm not quite sure I picked up the question. Are you asking whether there different levels of harm that can be contributed by more intense pornography or more legal or illegal pornography?

Health committee  Right, there are a couple of things there. The first one is that the pornography that my work involves is pornography that's not usually accessible to most people. It's the deep web. It's all very clandestine. You need to know exactly where to go. It's a global community. As I

Health committee  It's any type of what we could call the more disturbing side of images. It could just be physical aggression that children are watching. There were a ton of studies of those images in the eighties and nineties when television was seen as the biggest concern. The more you watch