According to Psychologies Magazine, recent increases in hardcore pornography online are having a terrible effect on children and young teenagers. As darker and more violent images are becoming easier for young people to find, the magazine has started a campaign called Put Porn in its PLACE to try and help.
At first, I thought this was a bit of an over-reaction. A Daily Mail-style "think of the children!" campaign designed to create outrage but only backed up with rather vague statistical evidence. Do children really search for porn online and, is so, is the stuff they find really that bad? We were all curious as youngsters and I know many people who learned a lot from pornography in their younger days, so are the kids of today really in that much danger?
In their article Are Teenagers Hooked on Porn?, Psychologies states that "The average child sees their first porn by the age of just 11. Between 60 and 90 per cent of under-16s have viewed hardcore online pornography, and the single largest group of internet porn consumers is reported to be children aged 12 to 17," but, with no links to statistical data to back up those claims, I was suspicious. I emailed the magazine to ask for further details but have so far received no response.
So, with no children of my own, I did what a lot of people would do. I asked the lovely folk on Twitter for help. Do they know if kids really look at porn on the internet? I heard back from a few people, some of whom work in schools, and through this I was reminded that it is actually quite easy to search for something relatively innocent and get a lot more than you expect.
Apparently, some 11-year-olds search for "hot girls" or "hot babes" on school computers. Fair enough, you might think, but I tried this myself and the fifth link Google returned in its results – after some expected FHM level stuff – was a site offering rather horrid free porn. I clicked on one of the video links and there was an advert alongside it for something called "18 & Abused".
That's not something a young teenager would necessarily have the knowledge to deal with. If kids are able to find images and videos like this before they have been properly educated about sex, are they going to think that this behaviour is normal? This was found using the moderate search though, which only filters out explicit images, so I would hope that schools and parents would have rather more strict filtering rules applied!
Even though I was initially suspicious of the campaign, I can now see that Psychologies really are doing a good thing. They are raising awareness of the issues behind access to internet pornography, something many parents may not have thought about, and are advising people on what they can do to help. I hope their campaign continues to get plenty of press coverage and make people think.
Image via Psychologies.co.uk