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A recent case involving a Texas man allegedly forcing his 8 and 9-year-old daughters to watch online pornography has prompted Texas officials and parents to fight a state law that allows parents to show their children “harmful material.”

The law was originally created in the 1970s in order to protect parents who wanted to teach their children about sex education. As written, the law specifically says that parents can’t be prosecuted for showing “harmful material” to their children, but doesn’t set boundaries as to what constitutes such harmful material. Thus, the door is left open for potential abuse. In the aforementioned case, the incident came to light after one of the girls told a school counselor that her father made her and her sister watch an online video of group sex.

The mother of the children is upset that nothing can be done about her ex-husband’s actions. She’s spreading awareness about the law in hopes of changing it, recognizing that she herself wasn’t aware of the law until she tried to have her ex arrested.

With the rapid rise in the number of children with access to the Internet, parents owe it to their kids to teach them about the potential pitfalls of the world wide web, not lure them to danger.

The Internet is filled with images that children should not be exposed to, even under the supervision of their parents. For example, child pornography has become so common on the Internet it has turned into a multi-billion dollar commercial enterprise. In the decade since the FBI launched a 1996 initiative to combat online child pornography and exploitation, the number of such cases jumped by over 2,000 percent. It’s also estimated that some child pornography websites receive more than one million visits in a single month and that victims are becoming younger and the images more graphic and violent.

Let’s not forget that the broad audience for child pornography drives up the demand for child pornography to be produced—and in turn, the demand for children to be molested in front of cameras or live audiences. Worse, showing any type of porn to kids is a common “grooming” practice of pedophiles that desensitizes victims and makes them less likely to resist further advances. This type of grooming is widely considered by child advocates to be as abusive as actual contact abuse.

Of course, sexual education is an important and laudable goal.  And parents ought to have the right to teach their children about sex in privacy without fear of persecution or prosecution. But the same law that protects the privacy rights of parents also needs to protect children from exposure to dangerous or harmful content. So while no one is accusing this Texas father of sexually abusing his daughters, let’s hope the state legislature better clarifies the intent of the law and helps protect families from this type of abuse in the future. Such action is necessary to adapt the law to better fit today’s Internet hungry environment and to better protect each and every child.