Porn ‘fact of life’ for NZ kids
‘Halftime’ in Dotcom case?
A quarter of all children under the age of 12 living in New Zealand have seen pornography, which these days is ‘‘as close as the nearest phone’’, a report has revealed.
The Chief Censor’s NZ Youth and Porn study, released yesterday, said two-thirds of those aged between 14 and 17 had been exposed to pornography, and almost half of regular viewers could not stop watching despite wanting to.
Regular viewers, young people who viewed porn either monthly, weekly or daily, made up 15 per cent of which 21 per cent were boys and 9 per cent girls.
Of those youths 73 per cent used porn as a ‘‘learning tool’’, which they said had both positive and negative impacts on them.
‘‘On a positive note, porn exposes you to different genres of sex and diversity within roles, but a negative is that people can get exposed to an unrealistic standard of sex,’’ a 17-year-old girl said in the report.
The report found, children were exposed to ‘‘violent, aggressive, misogynistic and coercive behaviour’’ and the majority wanted restrictions placed on the online content.
‘‘They think that’s what females are into. All the hardcore porn, they think it’s normal. And if you don’t do it then it’s all then: you’re a prude,’’ another girl said.
The study is an in-depth view of how pornography has influenced Kiwi children and why they were accessing the content. Young people who had seen pornography on a monthly basis made up 15 per cent of respondents and up to 8 per cent had watched it on a weekly or daily basis – the majority of them being boys.
Regular porn viewers started young, the report said. One in five young viewers had tried something they saw.
Chief Censor David Shanks said technology had shifted ‘‘everything we knew, or thought we knew, about porn and young people’’. The main reasons young people accessed porn was curiosity and stumbling across it by accident. Other influences included entertainment, arousal, and boredom. The way most accessed sexual content was on mobile and smartphones.
‘‘Access to online pornography is easy, particularly if a young person owns a mobile phone ,’’ Shanks said. ‘‘The amount of time young people spend looking at porn is relatively low compared to the time young people spend online.’’
There were 33 per cent of young people who had watched porn for more than half an hour.
More than 85 per cent thought watching porn was common for boys but less than half felt the same way about girls.
Young people felt they should have more access to information on sex in schools.
The next step was to consider regulation, offer support through tools and information, education and further research. After seven years, the case for the extradition of internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom might only be at ‘‘halftime’’, the Supreme Court has been told. Dotcom and three others are wanted to stand trial in the United States on criminal copyright infringement charges. Dotcom and business associates Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato, have been found eligible to be extradited. They have been fighting attempts to extradite them since 2012. At the Supreme Court in Wellington yesterday the lawyer for the US, David Boldt, said even if the US argument succeeded and the four did not get an appeal to the Supreme Court, there was still an entire ‘‘surrender’’ phase ahead of them. The eligibility decision has gone from the District Court, to the High Court, then the Court of Appeal, and potentially the Supreme Court. However, it was not the end of the matter, Boldt said. It would then go the Minister of Justice and an ‘‘entire suite of remedies’’ from there. ‘‘After seven years we might almost be at halftime,’’ Boldt said yesterday. The court reserved its decision.