Kids' exposure to porn: Study

I just received another email from Jessica, parent of three teens in Michigan, with more than four dozen URLs of X-rated pages in a social-networking site. I haven't looked at them all (I pass them along to the site's customer-service department), but the URLs themselves are highly suggestive of sex-related content – e.g., two of the more mentionable ones are "gurl-frm-hell" and "DUDEWITHCAM." I'm telling you this because it bears out researchers' latest thinking about online porn – that exposure to it may now be a norm of teenage life. But let me quote the researchers exactly, with some important advice they pair with this finding: "Exposure to online porn might have reached the point where it can be characterized as normative among youth Internet users, especially teenage boys. Medical practitioners, educators, other youth workers, and parents should assume that most boys of high school age that use the Internet have some degree of exposure to online pornography, as do girls…. Frank direct conversations with youth that address the possible influences of pornography on sexual behavior, attitudes about sex, and relationships are needed." That's from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) in their just-released analysis in the journal Pediatrics of a 2005 study. [Here’s TechNewsWorld's coverage of this much-covered analysis.]

The key new issue highlighted by Jessica's effort to expose and stop porn in social sites is that much of it is user-produced. This is the challenge of the youth-driven social Web: not just how to protect young people from porn operators and predators but, in essence, how to protect them from themselves and each other? The cold reality is that teens (and plenty of adults) are porn operators too – the homemade variety. [Here are Jessica's post in the BlogSafety.com forum about her findings.]

Back to the data. It shows that unwanted exposure to porn has been growing. The CACRC reports that 42% of US 10-to-17-year-olds said they'd been exposed to online pornography in the past year, and 66% of that group "reported only unwanted exposure." Thirteen percent went to X-rated sites on purpose, but a much larger number, 34% were exposed to online porn they didn't want to see (up from 25% about five years before this survey), due to things like pop-up ads, spam email, clicking on unintended search results, or misspelling Web addresses the browser window. [The authors did say that not all unwanted exposure was inadvertent; in some cases, curiosity leads kids to X-rated sites, and then they find the exposure is unwanted. Peer pressure can be another catalyst – the fact that kids are encountering porn at "friends' houses" showed up in the data.]

"Although there is evidence that most youth are not particularly upset when they encounter unwanted pornography on the Internet, unwanted exposure could have a greater impact on some youth than voluntary encounters with pornography. Some youth may be developmentally and psychologically unprepared for unwanted exposure, and online images may be more graphic and extreme than pornography available from other sources." For tips and one family's strategy for reducing kids' unwanted exposure, pls see this week's issue of my newsletter.