Is YOUR Child Watching Porn?

On a bed emblazoned with Hello Kitty images, 13-year-old Natasha poses for her best friend’s mobile phone camera. With one knee on the bed, and the other off, she raises her bottom in the air and looks around at the camera with a pout, set off by the red feather boa around her neck.
Natasha likes what she sees. You can’t see her spots and her face looks thinner when she twists around. So she posts it as her profile picture on Facebook, where more than a dozen of her 400 friends rush to post comments like ‘Ooh, nice a***’ and ‘Sexeee!’.
And why should she see this as inappropriate when millions of adults project an ideal image of themselves on Facebook. It’s a statement of what we think is most important about us.
You have only to comb through the Facebook or Bebo profiles of a few of today’s young girls, many of whom look like soft-porn stars in training, to witness how many want to be seen as sexy.
Of course, what woman hasn’t got a faintly embarrassing picture of herself getting ready for the school disco and posing as she tried to find what being ‘sexy’ looks like?


But the stakes today are much higher. According to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the sexier girls look in their pictures the more likely they are to be targeted by adult predators.
The latest figures show the organisation received 6,291 reports from the public, website hosts and online moderators last year (until February 2010) — a rise of 880 on the previous year. Offences ranged from grooming children online to distributing images and sexual abuse.
More than 400 reports included men asking girls to live up to the images they projected online by performing sex acts. So where do girls get the idea that they should parade themselves like pieces of meat?
And why do so many men think that children this age are ready, willing and able to turn these poses into reality for their sexual gratification?Pornography is so woven into the fabric of today’s society — and in our children’s lives — that even the dolls on sale in toy shops come wearing fishnet stockings and stilettos.
Yet many parents refuse to acknowledge the role porn plays in sexualising their girls, let alone accept that their children ever see it. Even those with much older teenage girls maintain their daughters are not ‘interested’, barely know what porn is — or would tell them if they saw anything disturbing.
They also prefer to think that hard-core porn is to be found only behind a safety curtain of pay walls for which children need credit card numbers to access. Middle-class parents, in particular, tend to believe it isn’t a problem in their homes.
However, even a 2005 study by the London School of Economics found that more affluent children are more likely to have their own computers, and tend to navigate further and more skilfully around the internet. They also spend more time on the web, have better online skills — and are well-versed at evading parental monitoring.
The study of 1,297 children also found that while 57 per cent of the over-nines had seen porn online, only 16 per cent of parents knew. One can only imagine how much higher the number is today, six years later.
It’s an unpalatable reality. It’s wildly optimistic to think our children don’t see sex on the internet in some form.
In fact, it’s become so widespread that it’s changing our children’s view of what sex is — and what is most worrying is that we don’t even realise it’s happening.
If the average girl who’s started to feel vaguely curious about sex taps that same three-letter word into Google, in less than a third of a second she will find thousands of video clips of the most extreme kind, available free of charge. Not even a password is necessary on many sites offering hard-core pornography.
However, parents are right to guess that their girls don’t go looking for it . . . at least not at first. It comes looking for them.
It finds them via viral emails circulated by older children, pop-up ads, computer viruses and download sites. Others get a shock when they misspell web addresses or click on the wrong link.
Among the younger girls I spoke to, many were aware there were ‘nasty pictures’ out there and were anxious to avoid them. They’re right. The market for porn has become so competitive that pornographers are fighting hard to come up with the most shocking images.
Straight consensual intercourse is almost non-existent because it is considered boring. Instead, the first glimpse of sex your child is ever likely to see may well be sickening images where women are degraded in the most disturbing ways.
Because we rarely talk about porn with our children, they don’t know it’s fiction and naturally assume it’s what grown-ups actually do. The sex our daughters hear so much about — and feel so much pressure to take part in — is shown as a brutal sport that men do to women.
There’s no kissing, no expressions of love or moments of tenderness. For children, who are born with an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, these images can be deeply disorientating.
Furthermore, to add to their confusion, many of the females they see online are identified as ‘barely legal’ — in other words, just 16 — in order to get around child porn laws.
They are depicted as genuine teenage babysitters, cheerleaders and schoolgirls. The message children receive loud and clear is that they are already objects of lust, old enough to engage in any sexual activity going.
Elsewhere, to add to the confusion, children looking up The Simpsons on the web can stumble across X-rated animation sites featuring Homer committing incest and Disney Princesses redrawn as porn stars.
To a child’s inbuilt moral compass, this is deeply disturbing. Yet even when they turn off their computers, porn is rubber-stamped everywhere they look — from the covers of lads’ mags to the clothing catalogues for their favourite designer brands.
It’s true that younger girls — mainly under the age of 13 — will initially greet extreme images with repugnance.
A survey by the Children’s Digital Media Centre found that a quarter of young people who saw pornography initially felt ‘disgust, shock or surprise.’ Other responses were anger, fear and sadness.
But gradually, it’s clear that girls become desensitised and start to view pornography as a graphic kind of sex education.
As sex becomes an ongoing preoccupation among their peers, their curiosity can become piqued. Older girls I spoke to for my new book admit to seeing it only at mates’ houses — and say it was ‘funny’ or ‘gross’.
But behind the dismissive attitudes, they seek it out to see what the fuss is all about, to find out what their friends are up to, to make sure they don’t sound naïve — and ultimately get tips on what they think they should be doing.
As they get older, the number of teenage visitors to porn sites climbs. By the time they’re 17, one in four says they have sought out porn.
To date, there have been no long-term studies about how this exposure affects young minds. For obvious reasons, we can’t show children explicit images and compare them with those who haven’t seen them.
But given the hundreds of studies linking TV violence to real-life violence over the past 30 years, it would be naïve to believe that porn has no effect. In 2008 a University of Amsterdam study of nearly 2,400 Dutch teens found that more frequent exposure to explicit internet porn was linked to a more open attitude to one-night stands and a ‘recreational’ view of sex.
Among U.S. high school students, one in six girls admits to putting into practice some of the sexual things she has seen in porn within a few days of viewing it. Here in the UK, six out of ten teens told a 2009 Channel 4 survey that porn influenced their sex lives.
While most of our generation learned what we enjoyed in bed through trial and error, girls are having their sexual identities foisted on them before they even have a boyfriend — let alone before they know what’s appropriate in a healthy sexual relationship.
All this is compounded by the fact that girls have come to confuse confidence with sexual aggressiveness. They think behaving like a porn star makes them look sophisticated in the same way as a pop star thinks that behaving like a lap dancer is a sign she’s in control.
But the most damaging lesson of all that our children take from pornography is that sex has nothing to do with intimacy or love.
Tellingly, it’s the first generation of young people exposed to porn at high levels after the advent of broadband who recognise how bad this early exposure was for them. In a poll for the book Pornified, it’s 18 to 24-year-olds who are most in favour of measures to regulate porn. Four in ten believe porn damages relationships — and changes what men expect from women.
Beyond what it’s doing to our daughters, we also need to ask how it’s affecting the generation of young men our girls have yet to meet. Porn allows men to think they need a variety of sex partners and stops them from finding true closeness with one woman.
Who can say how much heartache and how many broken relationships that could lead to for our daughters in years to come? And what of the present — and how it affects the attitudes of adults towards our children?
In a popular video on one of the most visited and accessible porn websites, a man is seen having sex with a flat-chested young woman, her ribboned hair in bunches, identified as ‘the slut from the Brady Bunch’. In the Seventies sitcom, Cindy Brady was only seven years old.