In an interview for Libero newspaper with journalist Hoara Borselli, Siffredi was responding to comments made by Minister for the Family, Birth Rate and Equal Opportunities Eugenia Roccella on Italian news website, Quotidiano.net, that according to the latest figures, “the average age at which children first access online pornography is just seven”.
“I’ve been saying this for ages,” Siffredi said.
“Why is politics posing the problem only now? Why have they allowed the proliferation of accessible and free pornographic sites on the net, easily usable by very young children, sending them distorted messages about sexuality?”
Roccella said: “Mr Siffredi agrees with me that this must be stopped, possibly because he is a father.”
She said there may be a “cause and effect” link to viewing violent online porn and rape and sexual abuse, which have been on the rise in Italy recently with several high-profile cases.
“However, a direct causal link has not been proven,” she cautioned in the Q&A on Quotidiano.net.
“I would like to open a debate. Not to establish automatic cause-and-effect relationships, but to gather evidence of a problem that experts on issues such as cyberbullying and revenge porn report with increasing insistence,” Roccella said.
“There is an educational problem that can also be deduced from judicial sentences that have caused much talk about themselves.
Recently, for example, Roccella explained, in another gang rape case, some boys were acquitted on the grounds of a wrong perception of the woman’s consent due to an idea of sex borrowed from pornography.
“[It’s] a sentence that I do not agree with, but which placed the problem,” she said.
It would be extremely difficult to legislate a form of intervention regarding minors’ access to pornography, Roccella told Quotidiano.net, at the moment it is more about getting information before proposing any action.
“... my aim was to open a debate,” she said.
“Let’s hear what family associations, parent groups, experts, the kids themselves think about it, and let’s also see what happens in other countries: in France, for example, proposing a law that goes in this direction.”
Roccella believes the school is absolutely central to any anti-violence strategy and that the most harmful factor is the concept of sex being separated from relational responsibility.
“It is necessary to explain to children that the body is the person,” she said.
“And that a sexual relationship, even in a five-minute acquaintance, is a relationship which always implies a responsibility towards the other.”
Speaking at the celebration Unity in Modena, Democratic Party leader Ellie Schlein said the issue clearly is above party or ideological differences.
“I want to appeal to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni [and say] the issue of gender-based violence is not a topic of political dialectics,” she said.
“I would like us all to work together to ensure that action is taken on the prevention plan as well as on the repressive measures on which we have already given our willingness to work.
“These are very young victims and perpetrators, this means that the culture of rape is also infecting the very young generations. We cannot allow that,” she added.
“[Hence] my appeal to the government and above all to the first female prime minister: we can do a common job on this with a large investment that starts from schools and eradicates that patriarchal prejudice of the right to possess the body of women that does not exist and does it generate violence even among the youngest?”
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