I did a very stupid thing today- porn related.

[Hakluyt]

I was talking to my ds about porn today- some of the kids at school have it on their phones and he was asking me about it. This afternoon, i decided to see how easy it really was to find it on the internet. I am, by the way, very strongly opposed to porn as a feminist and as a human being.

I am now shocked and depressed at what I saw. Literally 3 clicks to pages and pages of degrading, woman hating vile awful stuff. And lots oof "young teen"- always with a 18 in the title but a teddy bear on the bed or a little pleated school uniform type skirt. Hideous. I can't unsee it, as they say- but if you're thinking of doing the same, don't. I'll take this one for the team- you don't have to.

As parents, should we be complacent in allowing kids access to the dangers of the internet just because they are smart and can work around a filter? Open conversations with children plus proactive protection should not be avoided. They need to know there are consequences for actions in a school environment and respect that.

If we allow them to take devices to school, it is our responsibility to ensure adult content can not be viewed on it. Kids are naturally curious, they have very detailed sex education lessons, which should also cover the importance of healthy relationships, consent and the damaging affects the porn industry has.

Which leads me onto this insightful video of what the porn industry is like and the damages it can do from one womans view, the illusion of porn and what goes on behind the scenes, the prostitution rings selling women as a commodity, completely corrupt and unregulated opening doors to so many other dangers with drugs, rape, abuse, suicide etc because they were initially drawn in to make money they couldn't make elsewhere.

Of course online porn is easy to find if you set out to find without any "net nanny" software in place.

But if you don't set out to find it it's extremely unlikely one will accidentally stumble upon it.

In 15 or so years I've never came across porn when I'm not looking for it (although I'm savvy enough to have most ads blocked and I don't click on any ads that aren't blocked).

And yes, net nanny software is very easy to circumvent or disable and I would imagine in general teens or even kids are better at knowing how to do so than their parents.

It's not naive to plan how you're going to parent. It is naive to expect the rest of the country's parents to do the same.
Ds was shown porn at school when he was 9 or 10. The He put some of the terms he heard 'anal' and 'milf' on the family computer in the living romm while I was making dinner and in between club penguin.
Obviously I have strict controls on the PC now.
My friend was on the train at end of school time. Some 13-14 yr old boys had porn on their phone and were discussing graphically how to have anal sex in front of some quiet 11-12 yr old girls. My friend shouted at them- no one else did anything- and later called the school (who weren't particularly interested)
There is more and more anecdotal evidence on how porn affects young people negatively but it seems while we can try to hold back the tide individually we have very few tools at our disposal on a societal level.

@JFR
Completely agree with your view and attitudes towards safeguarding your kids / positive parenting
As you say, there is so much evidence about the harm it can do to children, effectively warping their minds before they are even fully developed, it is worrying.

However there are tools out there and obvious steps that can be taken, as follows:

• Free downloadable Web protection for devices. It's free and easy to install.
• Introduce Web gateway signups with credit cards on adult only content sites.
• Have Internet providers default subscribers to safe categories unless they request it to be opened.
• Schools should include lessons on effects of porn, the sordid background of it and links to prostitution rings as highlighted in the YouTube video.
• Schools operate a zero tolerance policy on adult only content. Consequences are suspension or in extreme cases expulsion.

The problem i find is not what you can do with your own children but what other parents choose to do with their children. I'm very much a "let me see your phone" type parent and one that looks at browser history ect. I try and keep tabs on my children as much as I can.

I can't control what my son see's on other childrens phones ect. It's sad but it's so so hard to stop our children seeing porn.
Being able to talk to your children is a good start and being open. I know from my son that alot of the stuff that gets passed around is girls taking photos of themselves for boys. How do we get through to our daughters that they shoudn't do this under any circumstances.

Porn seems to be everywhere you only have to go on tumblr and its rife, not 18 checks no credit card it basically full of free porn and much of it is not professional type stuff it seems to be normal people who want or get duped in to posting this stuff.

Where it will end I don't know but we just have to try and mitigate against it with our children at this point in time.

God I am seriously freaked out by some of the posts here - my kids are pre schoolers still but really - age 6 or 8 is the average age for starting to view porn online????? Really????

I don't think that Teachers should be policing it by the way - I know too many teachers to know that this is utterly absurd, they already are struggling to actually TEACH our children with the mountains of targets and paperwork required.

WTAF are 8 yr olds doing with wifi enabled devices???? They do not need this for being able to be in constant contact with Mummy and Daddy, just a basic mobile telephone does thats urely?

Am I being beyond naive?? I desperately want to protect my babies from this and do not want to be having convo's about the porn industry with my 8 yr olds (when they get to that age, or will it be reception age by then??)

Feel slightly sick....

I think that this is so ubiquitous, that the only way to handle it is to know that your child will be exposed sooner or later, maybe they will seek it themselves maybe they will be shown it. And be open and frank about stuff and hope there is some mitigation.

I have girls and my concern is for their future sex lives, what they will look like when all the children have learnt how to "do sex" from porn, and with what I would consider more "advanced" practices presented as bog-standard activities. Leading to more opportunity for pain / harm / unpleasantness.

The dynamic between men and women in mainstream het porn is just fucked up it's awful. Basically sex is something that men do to women, there is no mutuality. The focus in on the man's pleasure and there is a healthy dose of just, I don't know, the women are totally treated as objects and there is usually a mild element of violence / sadism towards them IYSWIM.

So yes I do worry about what my daughters' early sexual encounters (and maybe later ones too) are going to be like.

DH works in IT, he says the best option at home is to use OpenDNS. It's configured on your router so anyone using the internet via your network can't access inappropriate content. DH says you'd probably want someone a little bit geeky to set it up. Of course that doesn't help at school and he also said he thinks routers should come with this kind of control as default, I do sometimes wonder why companies make it so hard to do? Same with phones of course, they should come with this kind of control as default.

It's interesting to see the perspective "I trust my children so I don't need filters". I also trust my children but want to make it hard for them to find inappropriate material easily. Not just porn but violent websites, pro-ana and suicide discussion groups, aites offersing illegal drugs. I know that my children have independent minds and private thoughts on which I have no insight. If they're really determined to access inappropriate content then they'll find a way but I will know that they won't be doing so out of boredom or idle curiosity.

I trust my children but I still use filters and have their computer screens places where I can see them because even good children sometimes do daft things with long-term implications.

The hardest thing for me at the moment is deciding when and how to step back, my eldest is nearly 16 but has ASD so has a growing need for privacy but still needs a bit more support.

My six year old uses wifi enabled devices at home, he doesn't have his own, granted, but he uses them to watch netflix and youtube and a couple of cartoon sites that DH set up (we don't have TV.) Also he plays games on a playstation which is connected to the internet for updates etc, and he plays games on DH's tablet.

OK, we are a tech heavy family, and he perhaps has more access to this kind of thing than some other children his age, but IMO it would be a shame to avoid it completely because of some dangers, when there are a lot of positives to be gained as well. I think that we do have a duty to help them learn how to navigate this environment, just as we teach them to cross roads and use knives safely, we don't shelter them from them until they are old enough to do it and then suddenly expect them to understand. When they are little we cut up their food for them and then let them use blunt tools until they are older, use with supervision, eventually we don't worry about it any more.

I do agree with you BertieBotts but it just freaks me out how young they are accessing it at school and showing it to their friends etc. My kids know how to use an Ipad and Iphone etc to use app games but they are not ones that connect online at the moment. (oldest is 4.5 yrs)

It just bothers me that even if you have strict controls in place at home you have no control over what other kids are showing them in the playground. I know this is obviously the case with many aspects of school life and they will be exposed to language and hear many things that you may not use at home but its the whole 'not being able to unsee it' aspect of most porn and the fact that I feel it is so damaging for their sexual development - both for male and female children. As several PP's have said it is bound to colour their view of 'normal' sexual practice if a large proportion of their knowledge is based on porn.

I guess it just makes me sad, I'm only late 30s and genuinely didn't see any 'porn' until I was about 15 - someone had smuggled an older siblings porn film to a party. I don't think I was particularly sheltered....was I???

I hope that by the time my kids grow up a bit their generation are actually more tech savvy and informed and aware of what is 'real' and what is faked. That goes from photoshoppped celebs and beauty/skinny images all the way through to porn etc but sadly I think it will be hard to pull off.

I both love and hate the internet in equal measure a lot of the time!!

I also agree with whoever said that all devices should be sold with the safety hardware in place and you have to work to remove it rather than the other way around. Maybe we should be campaigning for that as a starting point..

The only thing you can do AnnieLewis really is to talk to your children about things they might see at school. It's not parents that care about their children and are involved with their lives that have to worry so much, partly because they won't give them the equipment they need to be able to access this kind of stuff, however, there are always parents who, for whatever reason, are less able to be involved or knowledgeable about their children's internet activities.

All you can do is mitigate it by discussing things with them in a way they can understand. It's also why good solid PHSE is so important in schools. However, I agree that the notion that teachers should be somehow policing their pupil's internet activity while they're at school is ridiculous. Teachers are there to teach our children, not bring them up for us.