School porn is a growing problem. Few decades ago, the concept was hardly even heard. This is not because students back then were any better or that sex education was poor, but simply because the means were not as readily available.
With the rise of web technologies and mobile devices, access to pornographic content is only a click away, anywhere, anytime.
The stats are not looking good!
A report on teens’ engagement with online porn published by Common Sense Media states that some of the respondents (ages 13-17) confirmed that they had seen pornography by age 10 or even younger and that some of them have watched it intentionally and repeatedly.
Worse even, half of the teenagers surveyed said they “had seen violent/ or aggressive pornography, including media that depicts what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain.”
When you read these alarming stats in their actual context, they lose the surprise element. For instance, in the US alone, more than 84 percent of teenagers have their own mobile phones, and half of children (53%) own a smartphone by the age of 11.
The majority of these devices are Internet enabled offering teens constant exposure to all forms of digital content including that of pornographic nature.
Why stop school porn?
Pornography is addictive and unhealthy, period! Several studies have shown that exposure to this type of material can lead to serious problems down the road, including addiction, mental health issues, and even criminal behaviour.
Pornography watching among teens is also associated with a number of obnoxious and sometime violent behaviour including sexting and cyberbullying. Needless to mention the legal hazards involved in school porn which can sometimes expose perpetrators to criminal charges or other legal repercussions.
Pornography can also communicate toxic messages around topics related to human sexuality, gender equity, sexual morality, and sexual aggression, among others. Continuous exposure to these messages desensitizes viewers to these issues and normalizes the distorted images pornography communicates.
For instance, in their research on aggression in mainstream pornography, researchers Fritz et al., found out that aggression against women is common in online pornography and these acts of aggression are usually depicted with no repercussions.
The repeated exposure to such narratives carries the risk of wiring teens’ cognition to accept them as mainstream cultural acts. It is therefore important for schools, teachers, and parents to educate teens on the dangers of school porn.
Some helpful ways to mitigate the problem of school porn
Keeping your teens safe from explicit material can be a challenge, especially with the prevalence of online pornography. Fortunately, there are ways to prevent them from encountering it in school and limit their exposure to harmful content more generally. Here are a few tips to consider:
1. Talk to your children’s teachers and administrators and make sure they are aware of potential risks posed by technology usage. Ask them about safety policies and cybersecurity measures in place that help protect against inappropriate content.
2. Teens that watch pornography at school will also watch it at home if they get a chance. Make sure you install filtering software on home computers and use monitoring tools if needed. You may also consider blocking websites that contain explicit content and instruct your kids to use only child-friendly web browsers.
3. Educate your children on how to use Internet safely. Google’s Be Internet Awesome offers tons of safety tips and educational materials to use with kids and students to help them navigate the web in a safe and confident way.
Porn literacy
A number of public health experts, psychologists, and sex educators consider porn literacy a good preemptive measure to the problem of school porn. The purpose of porn literacy is to enable teens to think critically about pornography, discuss its implications, and come up with strategies to disrupt the distorted images it communicates.
Porn literacy involves opening up teens to what can be viewed by many adults as uncomfortable conversations. Still, as Lindsay Orchowski, a psychologist at Brown University noted, whether you see it uncomfortable or not, a growing number of adolescents are already watching porn.
Ways and tools to block porn websites
Here is a practical guide I wrote awhile ago where I discussed some of the effective ways and tools parents and teachers can use to block access to adult websites and inappropriate content online. These include parental controls, browser extensions, Google Family Link, SafeSearch on Google, restricted mode on YouTube, and installing security software. Check it out to learn more.
