A national daily yesterday had an article about the inroads pornography is making into the lives of increasingly young boys. Astonishingly, kids as young as 4 or 5 are accessing (often inadvertently) internet based porn and presenting with all manner of inappropriate behaviours at school and elsewhere.

Thirty years ago I warned anyone who wished to listen that if porn moved online (from the once restricted bricks and mortar premises), then there would be serious consequences for both young men and women. I remember some people giving me odd looks, as if I was a weirdo. But I had read enough clinical evidence even at that time about the effects of porn addiction in the lives of users to know better. And there is much more evidence today and it is all pointing the same way.

If a society does not protect its young from physical or psychological damage when it has the means to do so, then that is surely a mark of decline in my estimation. And that is where we are. In decline.