Online pornography: Chloe Shorten on the issue facing children and their families

How online pornography is infiltrating our children’s lives.

“Hewas sort of loud panting in my face and pretending like he was going to strangle me.” – Girl, 11

This was not the playground encounter that parents expected to hear from their daughter. The 12-year-old boy was acting out the “porno sounds” he had heard online. This account, and the many I’ve heard since, have alerted me to the reality that, when it comes to the digital world, something is going very wrong for our children.

To find out more, I spoke to friends, family and parents. Teachers said they were witnessing an increasing number of sexual conversations in the school yard. But the most enlightening stories were from young people themselves.

One girl told me: “The boys were talking about YouTube in class and said they were looking for girls with girls. I just wanted to see what they meant.”

Another very young girl told her parents: “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen. I want to go back in time.”

While a 17-year-old boy said blithely:

“It’s normal, everyone watches it.” Each story I heard had shock value, but even more disturbing was the helplessness everyone – kids, parents and teachers – felt in dealing with the fact that pornography has become the default sex educator in Australia and the mostly uninvited, and unwelcome, third wheel in some young people’s relationships.

I think we all share the hope that our children will explore their sexuality in loving, caring, safe and consensual relationships. We hope that they will learn that intimacy is wonderful when it’s reciprocal, between equals, when it is the natural outcome of mutual attraction. But porn culture is distorting and damaging their sense of self.

In 2020, Our Watch released a survey of nearly 2000 young Australians, aged 15 to 20. According to the survey, 48 per cent of boys have seen pornography by age 13 and

48 per cent of girls by age 15. Over half (56 per cent) of the young men surveyed said they viewed pornography at least once per week, while more than one in six watched it daily. For young women, 15 per cent reported watching it at least weekly, and just 1 per cent every day.

Australian researcher and advocate Maree Crabbe, founder and director of the violence prevention initiative It’s time we talked, says the Our Watch data is the first of its kind in Australia and the results are both powerful and revealing. “It tells us that boys are seeing porn, on average, three years

before they have a sexual interaction with another human being,” Maree says. “If they are watching porn weekly, it means they’ve seen hundreds of videos or images before their first sexual encounter … If it’s daily, the figure moves into the thousands. We can’t afford to ignore this issue.”

Curious kids

The first time I was confronted with porn as a parent was when my children were playing on a kids’ website and a hardcore porn ad literally popped up. We were all shocked and, while they were very small at the time, there were questions to be answered.

Accidental viewing is one way young people are exposed to potentially harmful content. This may be from a pop-up ad but it is also likely to come from their peers or in chats, games or other social media. The Our Watch figures confirm that, while a lot of young people access pornography intentionally, 56 per cent of girls and 46 per cent of boys were not looking for pornography the first time they saw it.

I am not a prude or anti-privacy, and I don’t want to interfere in the sex lives of adults. However, in a decade of public life, I’ve been an advocate for the wellbeing of children, young people and parents, and have written books about families. I’m concerned that pornography is changing our children.

It is hardly a bombshell that teenagers look at porn – an interest in sex is developmentally normal and children are curious – but what is concerning is the ridiculously easy access to hardcore pornography online, and the fallout.

Professor David Coghill, Chair of Developmental Mental Health at The University of Melbourne, warns that exposure to such videos can be traumatising.

“Our children are unprepared for what they are seeing and unable to properly process the scenes that are being played out,” he says. “These types of graphic and often violent images can be just as damaging emotionally as other kinds of more obvious trauma. Another great danger is that, because they are being experienced out of context and without prior experience, the content can be perceived as a true representation of sex and relationships.”

Not surprisingly, the research shows that porn reinforces gender biases and normalises sexual violence. Dr Michael Flood, who is an Australian expert in the impact of pornography on young people and their relationships, says that porn teaches “sexually objectifying understandings of gender and sexuality”.

In a 2020 paper, he wrote: “Men who use pornography more often are more likely to practise or desire dominant, degrading practices, such as gagging and choking. And women who use pornography are more likely to practise or desire submissive practices.” “Pretty much all the girls I know have tried it [choking] during sex.” – Girl, 17

Porn is not what it used to be. It is no longer a centrefold in Playboy or your brother’s dodgy VHS video. It’s not the soft porn you might expect to titillate the uninitiated. Type ‘porn’ into Google and extreme videos start auto playing. You don’t need a credit card – let alone proof of age.

The images that can be accessed in seconds are extreme, hard core and often violent or coercive. The dialogue, if there is any, is often demeaning, with common themes of violence, incest and rape. Moreover, porn is designed to encourage a recurring interest. Watching it can lead to compulsive viewing, setting children up for serious health and long-term behavioural risks.

Parents versus Goliath

The power of the porn industry, coupled with the colossal take-up of smartphones and tablets and access to high-speed internet, is now a super-force. Parents and carers are in an almighty battle against a huge porn industry worth as much as $US95 billion globally.

The Pornhub site had 42 billion visits in 2019. It’s the 10th most

“These types of graphic and often violent images can be just as damaging emotionally as other kinds of trauma.”