Flooded by porn

Research from the censor’s office suggests pornography is a fact of life for many Kiwi teens. What does that mean for their sexual behaviour? Tom Hunt and Georgia-May Gilbertson report.

There is a tsunami of porn washing over New Zealand children. It is R18 stuff about ‘‘step’’children and ‘‘step’’-dads. It is about teenagers. It is increasingly less about consent. It is about choking and strangling.

Curiously, in the oft-criticised industry, more videos show affection than aggression. But any restriction to adults-only is token at best.

‘‘Pornography is clearly a fact of life for many young New Zealanders,’’ chief censor David Shanks says.

‘‘While porn is supposed to be restricted to adults, our research shows a significant number of young people watch it too.’’

There is, in fact, more porn out there than anyone would know what to do with.

For the Breaking Down Porn report, staff at the Office of Film and Literature Classification watched 196 of the most popular videos in New Zealand over 46 hours.

The videos came from Canadian-owned website Pornhub, which research shows is most popular for those aged 16 to 18. They were the videos most watched by New Zealanders on September 13.

For many adults, what they see is clearly an act. But for younger New Zealanders it can easily be a miseducation, Shanks says.

There is little New Zealand can do to stop the flow of these videos. And, as Shanks points out, putting an ‘‘Are you 18?’’ question on the websites will not stop many. What it means is parents need to step up.

A list of suggestions from Shanks’ office ranges from parental controls and filters on computers to talking to children.

‘‘Even if you don’t think your child has seen pornography, it is better that you talk to them about it before someone else does,’’ the office says.

There is also talk of following a United Kingdom suggestion of some kind of register that people have to sign in order to view porn. There was even talk of New Zealand taking a leadership role – similar to the Christchurch Call – in an international effort to put some R18 gates on porn.

The research was imperfect. It looked at just a sliver of videos available on just one of hundreds of thousands of porn sites available.

‘‘Pornography is a way [for young people] to educate themselves about sex,’’ Shanks says. This means almost half of the New Zealand youth watching porn are being taught that sex between step-family members is normal. They are being taught it is OK even if a step-daughter initially says no, but finally concedes.

Researchers were pleasantly surprised to find just one in 10 of the videos showed aggression – a category defined not just by one person showing aggression but also the reaction of the person subject to it. Almost all showed aggression from a man towards a woman.

That surprisingly low figure was the good news among the bad: 35 per cent of the videos showed non-consensual behaviour of some kind. These were times when sexual contact was not welcome.

It should be noted that these videos were most popular in an era when issues of consent have been high in the media. This is the #metoo era, when public villains such as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have been identified.

‘‘I’m surprised constantly how often those working with children say it is just about the greatest issue of our time that no-one is addressing and encouraging public dialogue and discussion about,’’ Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft says.

Pornography, for young New Zealanders, is ‘‘one of the great, unaddressed issues of our time’’, he believes.

Exactly what the problems would be – as those children with free and unfettered access to porn through childhood enter adulthood – remain to be seen.

‘‘It’s a wake-up call and a catalyst for a national conversation about children and young people watching online porn,’’ Becroft says.

‘‘We have totally underestimated the avalanche of porn freely available to our children, uncensored and unregulated, in New Zealand homes day and night. Adults have been passive and abdicated responsibility for this.’’

Becroft backs calls for an R18 ‘‘age-gate’’. At the lowest end, that would mean people signing into porn sites saying they are 18; at the higher end, viewers would have to prove they are 18. ‘‘I’m not opposed to that either,’’ he says.

Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin is currently receiving advice from officials on what the Government can do about the issue – and she’s not ruling out age-gates.

‘‘At the moment, our regulatory system has no powers over this particular area . . . We’re trying to run to keep up with the internet,’’ she says.

Victoria University criminology researcher Samantha Keene says education is critical when it comes to pornography and its tendencies.

‘‘The porn we’re seeing now is increasingly hostile, misogynistic and aggressive in nature.

‘‘We’re seeing the increasing eroticisation of inequality relating to gender, disability and aggression in a majority of contemporary material – that’s not to say it wasn’t present in previous types of porn, but it’s become a bit main-stage.

‘‘I think we’re right to be concerned about its harmful potential.’’

Strangulation – cited in the recent Grace Millane trial – is

the single biggest indicator of women’s experiences of lethal violence in an intimate relationship, according to research.

Keene says 88.2 per cent of popular pornographic themes contain violence against women, and that violence is typically accepted or positively responded to by women in pornography.

According to the Light Project, research shows that between 40 and 88 per cent of the mainstream porn young people watch contains sexual violence.

‘‘For young people, acts like strangulation are what’s considered a ‘normal’ sexual encounter,’’ says Nikki Denholm, lead researcher of the project, a charitable trust that aims to help youth to positively navigate the porn landscape.

‘‘In one content analysis from 2010, 28 per cent of the sexually aggressive scenes included strangulation.

‘‘We know in NZ two-thirds of young people have viewed porn. The latest NZ data shows, of 14 to 17-year-olds, 72 per cent have seen non-consensual acts, and 69 per cent have seen violence or aggression.’’

Pani Farvid, assistant professor of Applied Psychology at The New School University, New York, says young people often turn to the internet to access adult material without any context or understanding of what they are watching.

‘‘They don’t realise that porn is all about the camera angles, and is scripted in a certain way.

‘‘It can be problematic in the sense that it dismantles them from the reality of what love and sex is.’’