A report published today by the govt's Children Commissioner found that children are increasingly exposed to extreme pornography online - and that it's influencing their attitudes towards sex. In this guest blog, Sunday Times columnist (and MN Blogger) Eleanor Mills says it's time to put the protection of children first.
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"Basically, Porn Is Everywhere is the title of a new report published today, from the Office of the Children's Commissioner. It reviews 41,000 pieces of research on the impact of porn and finds that widespread access to porn amongst youngsters is encouraging teenage boys to see girls as sex objects , engage in risky sexual behaviour and have sex earlier. Most worrying of all, it also shows a link between boys who view porn and more aggressive sexual behaviour and violence.
I'm tempted to say I told you so. For the past three years now I have been writing regularly about what I call Generation XXX (£) and the problems the tsunami of online porn is creating for today's teenagers and their relationships. These days everything from television to music videos, Instagram to the mania for sexting demonstrates the pervasive pornification of youth culture. Yet on we trundle, seemingly indifferent to its pernicious effects. Maybe now the naysayers will agree that there is a problem and take the appropriate action.
The writing has been on the wall about the harm done to youngsters who view adult sexual content on the web for a while. A few months ago, I attended a conference at the University of London's psychology department entitled Virtual Adolescence. As the day unfolded a succession of speakers, including Professor Alessandra Lemma (a world expert on body image and mental disorders) and John Woods, a consultant psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic in London, outlined the mental toll that screen life is taking on our children.
The stand-out talk of the day, given by Woods, was called Child Abuse on a Massive Scale: The Effects of Unregulated Pornography. It made for worrying listening.
Woods cited a study by HealthyMind.com which found the average age of first exposure to such images is six (other recent research has suggested the average age is eight) and that the largest consumers of internet porn are the 12-17 age group. These alarming figures are backed up by a new EU Kids Online survey which found that pornographic and violent content top a list of children's own internet concerns (57% say concerns about internet content "most bothered" people of their age).
In his lecture Woods outlined some disturbing examples from his clinical practice including 'James', whose long-term porn fascination led him to assault a five-year-old boy 'because he wanted to know what it felt like'. James, 16, had watched so much porn, Woods said, that he had "no idea the other person needed to give consent to be penetrated".
Another boy, Jeremy, 14, was "driven mad" by his compulsion to view illegal images; before the police confiscated his computer he had been spending at least two hours a night on increasingly violent porn websites while his parents thought he was doing his homework. During his therapy with Woods, Jeremy explained that the only way he could control the images that kept returning to his mind of animals, kids, stabbing and strangling was to 'switch the computer back on, as then the images were back there' rather than in his head.
I fail to understand how a society that insists on a 9pm watershed for swearing on television and rates cinematic content with 18 certificates so adult material is not seen by children, is so callously slack about the tsunami of brutal, violent porn available with two clicks of a mouse. This bafflement was widely shared at the conference. Woods, who treats young teen sex offenders, likened the inability of society to get a grip on the harm being done to a kind of 'mass psychosis'.
Why do we let it slide? The first reason is ignorance: many parents equate porn with the top-shelf centrefolds of their own youth, unaware of the smorgasbord of violent perversion so easily available on the internet. Attempts by the government, led by the MP Claire Perry, to establish an 'opt-in' system for the internet (the default setting for an internet feed would be porn-free unless users specifically asked for adult material, in which case they would have to prove they were over 18) has failed. The government, under pressure from internet service providers, has instead gone for a weaker system that prompts new users of broadband to set up parental controls on individual computers.
"That is inadequate, completely inadequate," countered Diane Abbott, the shadow public health minister, when I popped in to see her in Westminster. "The opt-in is so important. The problem with relying on parental controls is that every self-respecting child can get round them." That's why a new system, whereby internet service providers can give households who want it a clean feed - ie one without porn, so adults can opt-in for porn if they want to rather than children coming across it when they don't want to - is, in my view, so important.
Abbott sees internet porn as a public health matter. Since she spoke out about this at the Fawcett Society last month she has been taken aback by her postbag: "I've had hundreds of letters - they are really touching because they are not part of some orchestrated campaign but are from genuine women describing their distress at the pornification of culture and the sexualisation of women and girls that goes hand in hand with it.
"People think when you raise this that you're complaining about pictures of girls with bare breasts. Well, I'm not particularly concerned about bare breasts. What these children are seeing online is of an entirely different order; it is really horrible stuff which brutalises and degrades women. There'z a link between exposure to that sort of pornography and violence within relationships."
Abbott is right about that. Woods cited research that shows adolescents who watch internet pornography not only "relax their boundaries towards sexual violence" but are also more likely to "see women as sex objects and engage in risk- taking behaviours such as unprotected sex".
The Icelandic government is so concerned about the way violent internet porn seems to stoke sexual aggression that it is considering becoming the first democracy in the western world to ban online pornography. "We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti- violence," says Halla Gunnarsdottir, an adviser to the interior minister. Porn in this definition is not sexually explicit material but images that show hateful, violent sex.
That is exactly what the internet is awash with. So when children click on porn out of a natural curiosity to find out about sex (sex is the most common word typed into search engines), what they find isn't loving, consensual acts - albeit of a raunchy nature - but the most outré acts you can imagine (and many you can't).
The fact that society does not attempt to control or ban the extreme material that is so easily available sends our young people the message that it's standard to have group sex - and that violence is acceptable. Understandably, young people are confused, frightened and disturbed by what they see. Add arousal to that mix (patterns of early sexual arousal tend to stick for life) and it's not surprising that psychologists are worried.
Of course, it is oversimplistic to say that if you watch a rape-style fantasy online you immediately go out and commit one - but what a range of experts are beginning to agree upon is that widespread consumption of internet pornography, particularly at a tender age, shifts the way people think about intimacy, relationships and women. (Gail Dines, author of Pornland, describes just how porn hooks young men in in this article I published last week in the Sunday Times News Review. [£])
A good barometer of porn's influence is the fact that young people, raised on hairless porn stars, spend vast amounts of time and money having their pubic hair removed for fear of being seen as unattractive. Similarly, psychologists commonly report adolescents seeing sex as all about performance - ie, does it look like the porn they have seen? - rather than it being about a connection with the other person or pleasure.
Teens are caught in a web of pornified norms: sexting, indulging in unsafe sexual behaviour and generally feeling freaked out by 'expectations' implicit in the material they are viewing. I met one 14-year-old who was being sent porn clips by her boyfriend as prompts to what he wanted them to do that Saturday night. Woods, too, spoke of how porn spills over into reality, telling of a 17-year-old boy who reported himself for treatment because he had started following women down the street and was frightened he might "go further" in acting out his porn-fuelled fantasies.
Woods spoke passionately of the need to educate people about the risks of teen porn consumption, to support research that examines the effects of internet pornography and to "legally implement technological solutions that separate internet content, allowing consumers to choose the type of legal content they wish to have access to" - in other words, an 'opt-in' system.
It's up to all of us to make it happen.
I feel so strongly about all of this that on 2pm on June 11th at the offices of the think tank Policy Exchange in central London, I'm organising a conference on the subject, entitled Generation XXX. Attendees include MPs Claire Perry and Diane Abbott and Gail Dines, author of PornLand, an American academic who has led the charge on the damaging effects of porn. Dr John Woods from the Portman clinic, whose talk I mention above, will also be speaking - alongside some of the youth workers dealing with the fall-out from all of this on the front line. If you would like tickets (which are free) contact [email protected]."
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