B75 Lyndon Letter March 2020

B75N

PRAYER AND ACTION! Our work carries on and CARE will work hard alongside MPs and Peers to ensure that this time these age-verification controls are definitely included and implemented! We support plans to set up appropriate services, enforcement, and education so that the law is properly backed up in these practical ways. In partnership with the Naked Truth Project, we’ll also be hosting a Parliamentary conference on this issue once the Bill reaches a critical stage.

LYNDON BOWRING Chairman

All of this is only possible with your continued prayer and support. I hope the enclosed ‘Ten Ways to Pray for Children and the Internet’ helps you with this – please let us know if you’d like more free copies for your praying friends.

May God in His mercy and compassion give us the opportunities, wisdom and grace to work with others to bring about a change in culture so that our children are no longer at risk from the devastating effects of online porn and other dangers lurking online.

Yours, because He is Lord of all!

March 2022

Rev Lyndon Bowring CHAIRMAN

PAST AND PRESENT In the early days of CARE, we were faced with a tsunami of ‘private sex shops’ selling explicit pornography near schools, next to churches, and in residential areas – but local authorities had no control over this. That’s why we campaigned during the passage of a Local Government Bill to allow each local authority to limit the number of sex shops in their area. The pornographers thought that at the very least one would be in each locality but CARE’s lawyers, realising that, in law zero is a number, councils could turn down every single application! Many took advantage of this and as a result scores of shops closed across the UK! We are deeply grateful to God and pay tribute to the many concerned Christians who wrote to their local councils at that time.

My godly Welsh grandmother used to pray for me several times a day but often got mixed up!

‘I’m praying for you at Spring Harvest’, she’d say, when actually I was speaking at the Keswick Convention, and she definitely hadn’t grasped what my Chairman’s role in CARE was about, including our campaign against pornography. I’d picture the angels in heaven’s ‘intercessory sorting office’ busily switching her prayers into the correct pigeonholes! One day my mother took her to the local GP. There was always much conversation in the Caerphilly doctor’s waiting room, and when a neighbour asked, ‘How’s your grandson Lyndon doing in London?’ she replied proudly, ‘He’s doing wonderful! He’s Chairman of all the pornography in London!’ My mother nearly died of embarrassment, but the neighbour was clearly impressed, saying in her rich Welsh accent, ‘Oh! There’s lovely!’

CAREORGUK

CARE.ORG.UK

CARE (Christian Action Research & Education) | Chief Executive Ross Hendry | Chairman Rev Lyndon Bowring 53 Romney St, London, SW1P 3RF | 020 7233 0455 | mail@care.org.uk | Charity No: 1066963 | Scottish Charity No: SC038911

What a stark contrast between that innocent lack of awareness compared to the situation today.

I pray that as you read on, your heart will be moved to support CARE in our renewed efforts to resist the increasingly vicious, violent and degrading porn that’s so readily available that even a child can stumble on it. This is a difficult and embarrassing topic but it’s seriously damaging family life, ruining relationships and threatening the welfare of our children.

BIBLICAL TRUTH Jesus reserved His strongest condemnation for those who damage children’s lives, saying ‘if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.’

‘All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realise what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.’ 2 Timothy 3:16 (New Living Translation) You’ve probably never heard Leviticus 18 read out in church or listened to a sermon on its content. It contains a long list of sexual activities that were common practice in Egypt and the local Canaanite nations but forbidden for God’s people. They included incest, adultery, fornication, bestiality… all of which, and more, are graphically portrayed in online pornography.

HEART-BREAKING REALITY Alongside the incredible benefits of digital technology for education, communication, sharing faith, entertainment and much else, there are murky areas on the internet. It’s heartbreaking that vulnerable young people are being preyed upon: to lure and groom them for sex, to involve them in gangs to carry drugs or weapons, and to recruit them to radical agendas of racism and jihadi propaganda. and many young people are regularly accessing degrading pornographic material.

The online porn industry is staggeringly successful, spawning hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide.

In 2018 the Quartz news organisation estimated the total revenue to be £11,000,000,000 and pointed out that the UK’s most popular ‘Pornhub’ is reckoned to be the tenth most visited website in the world. In 2019, the British Board of Film Classification’s ‘Revealing Reality’ survey of 2,344 parents and young people found more than half of the 11- to 13-year-olds said they’d seen pornography – rising to 66 per cent of 14- to 15-yearolds. Research shows that pornography depicting violence, coercion and degradation inevitably shapes the way adolescents think about sex, and many approach relationships regarding such behaviour as normal and acceptable.

In June 2020 a young woman set up the ‘Everyone’s Invited’ website to share stories of this kind of sexual harassment and the ‘rape culture’ existing within a number of British schools. Thousands of distressing testimonies were sent in, some by girls as young as nine.

ENCOURAGING SIGNS CARE is a huge supporter of the Naked Truth Project founded in 2013 by Ian Henderson, because he’d seen how porn hijacks people’s lives. It addresses its impacts in schools, churches, and culture and provides practical support. From 2016 onwards CARE and Naked Truth hosted ‘P-Word’ conferences in London, Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow to highlight the problem and encourage church leaders to be part of the solution. Ian believes that we must talk about this difficult subject, saying in a recent Church Times interview, ‘Christian silence communicates that porn is too terrible to discuss, and so users feel they are terrible, and there’s no help for them.

None of that is true.’

I’m encouraged that there’s amazing creativity and determination out there to find answers. One recent example came from graduates on CARE’s Leadership Programme who were assigned to design a project to influence culture for Christ, using an imaginary one million pounds per year for ten years. This year’s winner was a ‘Clean Screens App’ aimed at parents and churches. The app would provide relevant information and advice, seminars and workshops to help adults and children to understand the problem and take steps to overcome it. And alongside that, we need to lobby politicians to legislate to outlaw unscrupulous porn-mongers more strongly.

GOVERNMENT U-TURNS Laws alone won’t change people’s behaviour, but they can signpost how we should act, and restrain and penalise wrongdoing. Online harm is one of the greatest challenges facing us and the Government has a major responsibility to do something. In 2017, after years of campaigning by CARE and others, Parliament passed the Digital Economy Act. Its Part 3 required porn sites to use age verification checks to keep under-18s out, and also for an independent regulator to be given the authority to crack down on websites showing illegal, extreme and violent material.

However, to our dismay, in October 2019 the Government suddenly cancelled these plans, saying they’d bring in ‘better legislation at a later date’.

Despite our disappointment, CARE kept going, pushing the Government to implement age checks, and working with champions like Baroness Benjamin to this end. Last year, the UK Government finally introduced its draft Online Safety Bill. Despite our hard work, it made no mention of pornography websites at all! In faith, we pressed on and, just weeks ago, on Safer Internet Day 2022, the UK Government announced that age verification on all pornographic websites would be included in the new Bill! The Government’s press release even cited CARE’s own polling to highlight how much the public supports this.