Don’t let pornography become your child’s default sex educator

September 3rd, 2021 | Children and Young People, Letters and op-eds, News, Sexual and Reproductive Health

This op-ed was originally published in The Straits Times on September 3 2021.

Some of us treat sex and sexuality as shameful and taboo. Others are extremely comfortable talking about their sexuality. How do we come to have these beliefs and attitudes? What determines our relative openness and comfort with conversations about sexuality?

It’s hard to pinpoint any one determining factor, but experts believe that our attitudes towards sex are shaped at an early age by parents, peer groups, teachers, media and social media… and pornography. Yes, pornography.

As anyone who has spent time with teenagers, or been a teenager, can attest, most teens are naturally curious about sexuality. They may seek out (or accidentally stumble across) pornography to satisfy that curiosity. But what happens when adolescents watch porn without the tools to make sense of what they are seeing?

And is banning access to pornography the best way to protect children from its harmful effects? The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, earlier this week urged pornographic websites and social media companies to do more to stop children’s access to explicit materials. But while her recommendations, which centre on strengthening age verifications for such platforms, would surely help, many believe that such regulations can only go so far in enabling children to resist porn’s pernicious influence.

In Singapore, nine in 10 boys between the ages of 13 and 15 years have watched or read sexually explicit materials, according to a 2016 survey by Touch Cyber Wellness. Some surveyed children were exposed to pornography even before they started primary school.

While the proliferation of free streaming porn sites has made explicit content easier than ever to accidentally stumble upon, the survey showed that 54 per cent of boys intentionally sought it out.

Negative effects

Unlike more balanced and measured introductions to human sexuality, exposure to pornography (accidental or not) provides adolescents a distorted view of sex. Studies show that most mass-market pornography conveys the beliefs that sex is divorced from intimacy, for example, and that women are always ready for sex.

A longitudinal study among American adolescents also found that increased use of pornography predicted more sexist attitudes two years later.

Pornography also shapes models of behaviour and introduces new sexual expectations. It has been linked to sexually violent behaviour later in life: In another US study, people who watched violent pornography were more than six times as likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour.

A 2019 study found that 13 per cent of sexually active girls aged 14 to 17 have been choked by their partners; experts believe this to be linked to increased exposure in boys to violent porn, which normalises certain dangerous behaviours as “expected”. For young women, the pornography use of their male partners can also feed into their own body shame, and make them susceptible to coercion in sexual acts.

Regulating pornography

Parents at a virtual dialogue hosted this year by the Ministry of Education expressed concern about the easy accessibility of pornography online and suggested that more can be done to regulate such content.

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) maintains a symbolic ban on a list of 100 websites, most of which are pornographic in nature.

The ban is considered “symbolic” as it is intended to communicate the Government’s disapproval of pornography and to prevent young children from accidentally accessing these sites, not to comprehensively ban all pornographic websites available in Singapore. Of course, the proliferation of virtual private networks (VPN) has meant that any such ban, symbolic or not, is easy to sidestep.

Meanwhile, age verification measures are often beset with technical and regulatory challenges. Chief among them is the near impossibility of reliably verifying the age of the user. A Guardian report showed that fake profiles could circumvent these blocks within minutes.

Many parents we meet through Birds & Bees – an Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) programme designed to help parents initiate and sustain conversations with their children about sex, consent and respect – have told us about the range of filters and parental controls they use to completely block their children’s access to pornography.

Yet there are two hitches to this approach: First, according to a UK study, more 16- and 17-year-olds had seen pornography on social media platforms than on pornographic websites. These often escape parental controls because parents do not expect their children to find pornography on these platforms.

Second, parents often deploy these measures without any conversations with their children, or attempts to provide them with context. It’s natural to want to protect children from the deleterious effects of pornography by ensuring their access to pornography is regulated. However, is it realistic for us to rely on artificial barriers to porn as our main strategy? Even the most obsessively vigilant parents are hard pressed to monitor every single piece of media that their child consumes throughout childhood and adolescence.

More importantly, taking such a top-down approach to parenting does not make for the healthiest or most trusting relationships.

Instead, a number of sex educators and public health experts are recommending a new educational tool to push back on the negative effects of pornography exposure: porn literacy.

What is porn literacy?

Essentially, porn literacy aims to equip adolescents with critical thinking skills, so that when they do see pornography, they know how to unpack it. Instead of burying children’s heads in the sand, it teaches them to understand porn for what it is: profit-driven content that is potentially misogynistic at best, downright violent and exploitative at worst.

A study analysing one of the most comprehensive porn literacy programmes (titled The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum For High School Students Designed To Reduce Sexual And Dating Violence) found that students were less likely to see pornography as lucrative, realistic or a good way to learn about sex after taking the class. They also had a better understanding of the legality of underage individuals sending nude selfies.

Ideally, porn literacy in schools should be supplemented with parents talking to their children about pornography. These conversations can mitigate the harms of porn: A study found that pornography was associated with an increased probability of condomless sex only when parents engaged in little to no sexual health communication with their children.

Parents may be concerned that talking to adolescents about pornography will encourage their children to seek it out, but there’s no evidence to support this fear. On the other hand, a stand-alone conversation about pornography may not be of much help either – parents need to build on a foundation of regular, age-appropriate conversations about bodies, healthy boundaries and relationships.

A 2020 survey by Blackbox and Aware of 564 parents found that only half of the respondents were comfortable talking to their children about sexuality education. Thirty-five per cent of parents who were uncomfortable said they lacked the appropriate tools to begin conversations about sex and sexuality.

Unfortunately, unless parents can secure these tools (for example, via programmes like Birds & Bees) and schools can introduce porn literacy as part of their sex education curriculum, sexually explicit content produced for profit and entertainment will have “the Talk” with their children instead.

Shailey Hingorani, Head of Research and Advocacy, AWARE