I missed this article from MSNBC last February: Study: More kids exposed to online porn.
Forty-two percent of Internet users aged 10 to 17 surveyed said they had seen online pornography in the past year. Of those, 66 percent said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out, University of New Hampshire researchers found.
University of Chicago psychiatrist Sharon Hirsch said exposure to online pornography could lead kids to become sexually active too soon, or could put them at risk for being victimized by sexual predators if they visit sites that prey on children.
“They’re seeing things that they’re really not emotionally prepared to see yet, which can cause trauma to them,†Hirsch said.
The most interesting comment was the last sentence of the article: “Still, many survey participants said they were not disturbed by what they saw, and Wolak said research is needed to determine how exposure to online pornography affects kids.” “Survey participants”, bear in mind, are the kids themselves. The 2005 survey interviewed 1,500 Internet users from the ages of 10 to 17.
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I think in our haste to protect kids from things that are destructive, its important to remember that they are developing the ability to discern and self-select.
Kids on the farm see mating animals long before they are emotionally ready to deal with the full complexity of adult sexuality.
I’m not saying this in the defence of exposing children to porn, but in the hope that we can avoid hyperbole and better identify when, where, and how the really problematic responses to exposure occur, and hopefully how to respond to them. I can only hope and imagine this is also the intent of the researcher quoted here.
The other alternative – to eradicate porn from the internet and from kids lives, seems almost impossible. We can keep our own children relatively safe… but the kind of over-legislated society we would need to prevent the existance of such things, I suspect would be more destructive than the initial problem it might be conceivable constructed to address.
read conceivably constructed to address.
I agree we will never be able to eradicate porn (last stat I saw was that porn was a $4 billion a year business… that’s probably outdated and too small by now).
(BTW, I didn’t really understand the outcry against a (dot)xxx domain: not that enforcement would ever really be possible, but it seemed like a easy way for parents to block the sites.)
Seems to me like it all boils down to parents: monitoring and parenting our kids. Parenting children is more about risk management than risk elimination.
As a software developer, I’m very picky about software, its features, its stability, and its robustness.
So when I saw that K9 Web Protection is a really great piece of software, thats high praise. If you have kids that use the computer, I highly sugesst installing it. It does an excellent job blocking “bad” content, as far as I can tell it is bullet proof, and its free! just Google K9 Web Protection to find it.