PARENTS MUST READ THIS P38

FOR many of Scotland’s parents growing up, pornography would have meant top-shelf magazines and erotic videos. Those who grew up in the pre-internet age could never have imagined the deep and widespread threats of the online world surrounding children.

Many will not fully grasp it even now – and teachers too remain largely ignorant of the hazards.

The risks are real and potentially devastating to the well-being of a generation. Pornography is ubiquitous and becoming ever more extreme as it tries to hook users. This is not about simple titillation but a mind-warping addiction, wrecking children’s mental health, increasing cases of abuse and damaging chances of healthy future relationships. If I were First Minister for a day, I’d spend extra resources, as a matter of urgency, on lessons about the impact of internet porn on the teenage brain.

Parents reading this, more worried about the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – may think that is a curious choice.

However, when you become aware of the evidence from health, legal, educational and social experts about the impact this emerging addiction is having on our children, you may find yourself writing to your MSP.

Parents worry we might be teaching children too soon and spoiling their innocence. But most youngsters say lessons about sex come far too late to be useful.

Many councils will tell them that lessons about consent, and teaching boys they should respect girls, will do the trick. Sadly the problem goes much deeper.

Evolution has primed adolescent brains to be extremely curious about sex and the porn industry targets its products at the most sensitive part of the developing brain.

Unlike softcore magazines and DVDs of the past, since 2006 the internet has offered an unlimited variety of free, streaming, hardcore sex videos available at all times.

Even when parents put filters in place, many teenagers will get round

to‘ them or find other ways of accessing this material. The new Digital Economy Act requires porn sites to install an age verification system to reduce access by children. It is due to come into effect later in the year.

This should make it very difficult, especially for younger children, access porn sites as they will be unable to prove they are 18 or over. However, technology alone will not solve this emerging crisis.

In the past ten years I have worked in many schools, learned about best practices across the world, read extensive research and listened to hundreds of recovering porn addicts and sex offenders explain what would have helped them early on.

I believe pupils would benefit most from learning how porn conditions the brain and leads to escalation in about half of users, how it can lead to sexual dysfunctions, and the legal risks that can ruin job prospects.

Here are two indications of porn’s increasing influence. In 2016, Pornhub, the largest of many providers, delivered 92 billion video views worldwide. And, according to Department of Culture, Media and Sport figures, in May 2015 there were 1.4 million unique UK visitors under the age of 18 to adult sites.

The most popular searches are alarming. ‘Faux incest’, for example, includes babysitter porn and sex with mothers and stepsisters. Content includes coercive violence, verbal abuse and unsafe sexual practices.

Porn users often report escalating to edgier material, as they become habituated to earlier genres of porn.

More extreme content can function to increase sexual arousal in users who become blunted from chronic over-stimulation. More worrying is that the porn industry uses ‘persuasive design’ to try to hook our children.

From 1998, the Persuasive Technology Lab in California’s Stanford University developed techniques that are used by all the leading internet companies as the foundation of today’s ‘attention economy’.

Apps, smartphones, social media and video games are designed to alter thoughts and behaviours. They target the brain’s reward system, the unconscious motivation centre, and invoke cravings for more while desensitising one to normal pleasures. Evolution designed the reward system to motivate us to seek food and sex, bond with others, fall in love and seek novelty and achievement.

Problematic porn use focuses attention on sexual novelty. The multibillion-dollar porn industry is only concerned about profits, not its negative effects on users.

Last year, the Solicitor General said, at a summit with Education Secretary John Swinney, that between 2012 and 2016 there had been a 34 per cent rise in reported cases of child-onchild sexual abuse. Most of these happen in the family or friendship group. The effects are increasingly evident among adults, too, from a lack of interest in real sexual relationships to a 1,000 per cent increase in the past ten years in the number of men under 40 presenting to doctors with sexual dysfunctions.

Overexposure to online porn can cause structural and functional changes to the brain’s reward system and clinicians increasingly regard problematic pornography use as a behavioural disorder capable of changing the brain in a similar way to substances.

The University of Cambridge published an experiment in 2014 using brain scans that demonstrated this. Twenty-three compulsive porn users were scanned. Their reaction to porn cues in the brain’s reward system paralleled those found in cocaine addicts and alcoholics in response to cues to their object of desire.

Last month, the World Health Organisation published its latest revision of the International Classification of Diseases and with it a new diagnostic category of ‘compulsive sexual behaviour disorder’, an umbrella term that covers hypersexuality, or what is usually called sex addiction and porn addiction.

More than 80 per cent of people attending sex addiction clinics have a porn-related issue rather than a problem of excessive sex with others.

There are thousands of ex-porn users on online recovery websites, including teenagers, who tell amazing stories about recovering sexual and mental health after they quit.

We must encourage the Scottish Government to invest in our children’s mental and physical health by teaching about porn’s potential impact as a matter of urgency.

The risks are real and potentially devastating to well-being