So your kids have seen porn — now what?
It’s time to ignore the embarrassment and talk to the kids about not just sex . . . but porn.
And if you think you’ve got plenty of time as they’re too young to have seen it yet, chances are you’re wrong.
Sex and Relationship therapist Jo Robertson will be speaking at the Tautoko Mai Sexual Harm support event in Hamilton on Monday, a day-long event aimed at preventing sexual harm and harassment in the workplace.
Speaking ahead of the event, she told Stuff parents and caregivers need to be talking early and often to Kiwi kids about sex education to prevent them turning to porn for information.
And there’s no shortage of places to look.
While Playboy magazine distributed 7.2 million copies a month at its peak in the early 1970s, website Pornhub has 115 million people visiting it every day.
The best course is talking to kids about sex and porn before they are badly impacted by it.
‘‘Porn has a spectrum, so there is a better quality and terrible quality and the chunk in the middle is the stuff young people engage with.
‘‘That big chunk in the middle tends to be quite rough, quite aggressive, lacking consent, a lot of content between family members and a lot of focus on really young performers.’’
Robertson said the typical messaging is that young people like it to be rough, and they’ll smile in the face of abuse and violence, not only normalising, but eroticising it.
Robertson has found adults treat sex and porn as more of a taboo subject than young people.
‘‘It’s a really normalised part of youth culture that people consume, watch, share, and talk about porn.
‘‘It’s not embarrassing for them to own the fact they engage in porn, unless they’re from particular sub cultures.
‘‘We do find a lot of parents will feel uncomfortable bringing it up . . . But we don’t really have the luxury any more of staying in our discomfort.
‘‘We actually have to push past that because we know they are seeing it, we know the stuff they are seeing, we know there is a significant impact.’’
Robertson said that young people can be impacted in a number of ways if they’re getting their sexual education from pornography.
‘‘In terms of gender, boys are more important than girls, sex is for boys not for girls’’
Numbers have shown for the past 20 years the rates of intercourse (among teens) are declining but when they do have sex it seems to be riskier.
‘‘So less likely to use a condom, or engage in contraception, more likely for it to be rough, less intimate, more transactional, potentially engaging in riskier behaviour like choking, and then more casual about consent.
‘‘We have 42 per cent of regular young users of porn say they would like to spend less time looking at porn but find it hard not to.’’
Robertson said sex is not a onetime conversation. Adults need to talk early and talk often.
‘‘In an ideal world you would start talking about reproduction, consent, bodies, right from when they start asking questions, which is usually when they are about three.
‘‘But when they are asking questions about how babies are made there are answers you can give that are adequate for age and stage, and then you can keep growing that conversation.’’
She said for boys the porn talk could happen between the ages of 8 to 10-years-old and for girls, 10 to 11-years-old.
‘‘We do find a lot of parents will feel uncomfortable bringing it up . . . But we don’t really have the luxury any more of staying in our discomfort’’
Jo Robertson
But once again it depends on the individual circumstances, how much device use they have and whether a youngster is growing up with teenagers in the household.
‘‘Don’t have a big reaction to whatever they say, be really nonjudgmental. So if they’ve seen something you think is bad, just be aware that it is mainstream to them, they probably didn’t choose to see that content, it was pushed on them through the likes of Instagram, YouTube, Twitter.’’
Robertson isn’t saying porn should be banned from the Internet but controls around it needed work.
‘‘It’s about how we protect those vulnerable people in society and unfortunately, we’ve seen this in other countries, there is a battle between adults’ rights and freedom and children rights and protection, and adults seem to win that battle every time.’’
Jo Robertson is a co-founder of The Light Project, a charitable trust of sexual and public health experts who aim to help youth and their communities positively navigate the new porn landscape in New Zealand.
Tickets to the Tautoko Mai Sexual Harm support event are available at www.eventbrite.co. nz