Online pornography has long been a source of moral debate, but leading authorities are now warning the audience for the material is becoming younger and younger—a situation that has major implications for the mental health of a generation.
Our Watch, a national peak body for the prevention of violence to women and children, found the average age at which young people were first accessing pornography was now 13.6.
Other data collated by Collective Shout, an Australian organisation dedicated to ending sexual exploitation, found children as young as seven and eight were looking up pornography online, and some were also engaging in taking and sharing nude photographs.
Normalising Degrading Behaviour
According to Our Watch, young people are growing up with more access to explicit online content, would is harming their development.“Generations of young people are now growing up with greater access to porn, and it is porn that frequently shows abusive acts towards women,” Our Watch CEO Patty Kinnersly said in a statement.
“This can have a major influence on how young people understand sex, gender, and healthy relationships at a pivotal time in their lives.”
Fight the New Drug, an anti-pornography movement based in the United States documented that 70 percent of young Australians reported frequently seeing men as dominant in porn.
Add to that statistic that 34 percent of youths reported women in porn being called names or slurs, and 11 percent had seen frequent content involving violent or non-consensual acts.
All up, the data showed that 1 in 4 young Australians had repeatedly been exposed to depictions of violent, non-consensual sexual acts through online pornography.
Neuroscientific studies show repeated exposure to graphic content can normalise certain behaviours, while desensitising them to degrading material.
Fight the New Drug says a panel of researchers in 2016 concluded that, on average, porn consumption led to users being more likely to hold attitudes of aggression towards sex, and engage in more aggressive behaviour.
Kinnersly said there was great danger in what would have once been considered highly taboo content becoming normalised.
“Young men and boys who frequently use porn are more likely to blame a woman for abuse, while acts such as sexual ‘choking’ or strangulation commonly depicted in porn have become mainstream,” she said.
“More than half of women aged 18 to 35 report being strangled during sex at least once.”
Collective Shout’s data is sadly similar.
The organisation reports girls aged 18 who were interviewed and said they had come to accept that they would most likely be choked during sexual encounters without being asked.
Another teenage girl said acts such as choking were now seen as “vanilla” and “mainstream.”
Where Love Goes to Die
Another dangerous element of porn consumption has also emerged in recent years—the extinguishing of emotional connection between partners.Psychologist Jillian Spencer told The Epoch Times that porn was having such a significant impact on the minds of children that it was damaging their ability to have normal, caring relationships.
“It encourages young people to be preoccupied with their physical appearance and performance as a sex partner,” Spencer said.
“Pornography appears to be desensitising boys to sex such that they are requiring more extreme sexual practices to feel aroused.”
The outcome is young people are struggling to behave in a way that is conducive to the responsibilities of a healthy or normal relationship.
Porn is not only becomes a preoccupation for many young boys, but a replacement for dating.
“It breaks down the relationship contract between the sexes,” Spencer said, and this was also delaying the need for boys to develop proper relationship skills.
“Young women who desire love, connection, and sex with young men are having to compete with pornography,” she said.
An Assault on Healthy Development
Melinda Tankard Reist, a director at Collective Shout, referred to the current trends as “a pornographic experiment on young people” and an assault on normal, healthy sexual development.“Girls and young women describe boys pressuring them to provide acts inspired by the porn they consume routinely,” Reist wrote online.
“One of the biggest impacts of porn consumption, and perhaps most concerning, was seeing women as objects rather than human beings,” she added.
“Respect and consent education is widespread across Australia, but such lessons are no match for the power and influence of the global pornography industry, now the number one source of ’sex education' in the world.”
Looking Ahead
Our Watch’s Kinnersly wants to see better professional education for teachers on the topic of pornography.“Young people need safe and honest discussions to help them think critically about the portrayal of gender roles and relationships in porn, as well as the potential impact it has in their lives,” she said.
Meanwhile, Spencer called for a cultural shift, stressing that a“young person’s sexual template is developing throughout adolescence and needs to be protected from distortion by pornography.”
“There needs to be a cultural change where the harms of pornography are acknowledged, with a move away from the previous permissive societal attitude towards pornography,” she added.
