(Brussels) On the occasion of a meeting at the European Parliament today on the Exposure of Children to Pornography, the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE) launches a call to all MEPs to ask them to “improve the EU legislation on this matter”. The revision of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive that is being discussed would allow TVs – including on-demand services and video sharing platforms – to broadcast violent programmes and pornography as long as they are subject to “encryption or parental controls”. Today, however, children and young people “are very much at ease with technologies and access audio-visual contents from multiple platforms”, which makes it “difficult for parents to monitor what they are doing”, increasing “the risk that they are exposed to harmful content”, the appeal from FAFCE reads. Besides spending many hours in front of a TV screen (on average 6.5 hours a day in the UK, according to FAFCE), exposing children to pornography makes them perceive “a poor, often degrading and violent, image of sexual relationships, dissociating sexuality from the broader context of relationships”. Hence the request to reinstate “the ban of pornography and gratuitous violence from TVs and enlarging it to other audio-visual media services” – as in the legislation which is about to expire – in order to “better protect our children from harmful contents and face the challenges of digitalization”.