A child’s exposure to porn can start in many ways. It can start with the child typing ‘boobs’ on Google or it can start with a friend in school/playground showing something they found on the internet.
No matter how it starts statistics say that in India average age for viewing porn is 10 years and getting younger.
And in the US ‘porn’ is the fifth most popular internet search word for kids aged six and above. Think about that: age six and above.
The thing is that no matter how much you take care of as a parent, two things are sure: your child will come across something inappropriate online, and it will likely happen earlier than you think.
The thing about porn is that it is like going into a candy store with candies. Giving you the sugar rush. And then when after seeing all this, you get to the actual thing: it seems like eating a fruit – slow and tedious as compared to candies. For someone whose exposure to sex is porn, the reality of sex can be very different and disappointing.
What we can do as a parent is to help children understand that porn is performance. It’s an act for which actors are paid. If they see a porn movie where the actor keeps going on, it’s worth sharing with them that the average time for ejaculation for men is under 3 min. That the men on camera are performers who have taken Viagra, Cialis, injections or maybe all 3 to keep going.
That the way they are acting is not how real sex is. Real sex is awkward and tender.
I don’t have a lot of access to teenage kids’ lives but data says that 40% of young men in Goa have watched ‘rape-porn’. That most teenage boys before brushing their teeth in the morning have already watched a woman being choked, gagged, or slapped.
Children learn by seeing. This does not mean that each child who sees hard-core porn will become a rapist. However, studies indicate that the ‘pornisation’ of sex has led to more violent behaviour in bed in the current generation.
It is important to tell these children that these are movies with actors who are paid to do this. That some women might be ok to do this, but most women aren’t. Because otherwise, a young teenager fed on porn has difficulty understanding why his girlfriend is saying no to doing stuff like this when people online never say no. This is a place where porn can help us, and our children understand more about consent.
Porn is not only on Pornhub (the technology company also which after Facebook and Google supposedly has had the most impact on our lives ahead of Microsoft and Amazon) but also on places that kids frequent. 2/3rd of nine to thirteen-year-old kids in the US are on Roblox. So are many Indian tweens. And on this platform are plenty of places with NSFW (not safe for work) content – a couple of avatars having sex in the open while others comment on it, an occasional house which pops up where orgies happen. All this in a place made up for kids.
Porn is not new. It has been around always. In our times, it was in magazines like Debonair hidden in cupboards or below the bedsheets. It was slow porn. But now it is available at a click of a button like water gushing out of a tap. The news is not all bad. The availability of technology such as online platforms, sexting, and virtual dates while it has resulted in more exposure, it is also helping reduce teen pregnancies. As per statistics, they are at an all-time low.
The thing is schools could have filled in this gap but in most schools, sex education is done by segregating girls and boys in groups, telling them not to giggle and talking to them about fallopian tubes and scrotum. National Education Policy (NEP) has no mention of sexuality and ‘sex education’ is named as ‘adolescent education’.
So the burden of educating our kids – whether girls or boys – about sex and pornography falls mostly on the parents. Then why don’t parents do it? A lot of times because they don’t know how to do it. Many times, because they feel if they talk to their kids about sex, they will spoil the child or the child could feel it is ok to have sex. These sound like reasonable reasons, but the truth is if we don’t talk to our kids about sex, the internet will. And while we care about the well-being of our children, the internet doesn’t.
For India, 88 per cent of college-going boys have had no chat with their parents on sex – this includes cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai.
If you are waiting for your child to turn 13 before you talk about sex, chances are that you are too late. Porn has gotten them before.
A simple rule that one can apply is: talk to your kids about sex before giving them a phone of their own.
This can sound like a difficult task but it is not tough to do if you truly understand what not having this chat might mean for your child. And a great website to direct the kids to be educated themselves is amaze.org
As I read the book three chapters stood out for me: helping parents understand porn, sex in teenagers and the extent and impact of cyberbullying. And I wished these chapters were read by both parents AND teenagers in every house which has them.
The above text is a summary of my understanding of a couple of the chapters on porn and children by Neha Hiranandani for iParent. It’s her work. I am just paraphrasing it here. Link to the book on Amazon
