by Playfuls Staff |
5th February 2007
A new study to be published in this week’s edition of Pediatrics reveals that children and adolescents stumble upon more and more porn on the Internet, despite search filters.[more]
The exposure to porn occurs while simply browsing the Web and usually in an accidental manner, the study revealed. Among those questioned in the study, 42% have confessed that they have seen pornographic content (images or even short movies) in the last year. 66% of those who responded that exposure to porn occurred while they were Web-browsing have declared that they did not intentionally search for pornographic content and did not want it.
In the quoted study, online pornography is defined as pictures in which people engage in sexual intercourse or naked people posing in a provocative manner.
"It's so common now, who hasn't seen something like that?" said Emily Duhovny, 17, Marlboro, N.J. She also added that porn pop-ups are common for her Web-surfing experience and that when she first saw adult content she was shocked. But now, "more than anything, it's just annoying", she confessed.
"It doesn't have to be a negative thing, but that shouldn't be how you learn about sex education," said Duhovny, an editor for Sexetc.org, a teen-written Web site on sexual health issues affiliated with Rutgers University.
The study was conducted between March and June 2005 and it involved children and adolescents aged between 10 and 17. Most of those who were exposed to unwanted online porn were aged between 13 and 17. Still, sizable numbers of 10- and 11-year-olds also had unwanted exposure - 17 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls that age.
About one third of the boys aged 16 and 17 confessed that they had intentionally searched for porn sites in 2004, while only 8% of the girls of the same age confessed the same thing.
More than 1,500 young users of Internet were telephonically interviewed, after the researchers obtained the consent of their parents or tutors.
Overall, 34 percent had unwanted exposure to online pornography, including some children who had willingly viewed pornography in other instances. The 2005 number was up from 25 percent in a similar survey conducted in 1999 and 2000.
The latest survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
File-sharing programs and the simple downloading of Web-pictures were found to be the prevalent cause of unwanted/accidental exposure to pornographic content. However, the subjects of the study also confessed having stumbled onto X-rated images through other "normal" Internet use, like talking online with friends, visiting chat rooms and playing games. It was also found that although pop-up blockers, safe-search options and other parental-control tools were successful, they were not 100% effective.
The researchers urged for better methods “for restricting the use of aggressive and deceptive tactics to market pornography online”, but without sacrificing the access to legitimate sites.
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.
Exposure to unwanted porn could also lead to a deformed perception concerning a healthy sexual relationship, said Janis Wolak, the study's lead author and a researcher at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.
The surprising fact about the study is that many of the young respondents declared that they were not disturbed by what they saw, determining scientists to also urge a more thorough investigation about how online porn can affect children and teenagers.
According to a Digital Media Forum survey, an overwhelming 92 percent of Americans support blocking obscenity on school computers.
In the Internet Age, children are routinely exposed to hardcore images that would shock even the most hardened adults. And children now come into contact with Internet pornography so early in life that for many kids it is their first sexual education.
This exposure leads to all of the wrong lessons about sexual behavior; it can lead to more teen promiscuity, pregnancies, and abortions, as well as life-long problems for many kids.
Internet pornography is now an immense and lucrative online industry, generating earnings of more than $12 billion- roughly equal to the combined annual revenue ABC, NBC, and CBS. One out of every 8 Internet websites is pornographic, and there are over 400 million pornographic web pages on the net. Over the last eight years, the number of Internet porn sites has increased 30-fold.
-The most frequent viewers of Internet porn are kids 12-17 years old.
-The average age at which children are first exposed to online pornography today is 11 years old.
-Certain Internet pornography producers imbed children’s words like Teletubbies and Pokemon as “meta-tags” to drive kids to their sites.
-Approximately 20 new children appear on pornography sites every month, many of them kidnapped and sold into sex.
(
www.third-way.com)
