Back in 2003, Sonya Thompson was completing her Masters Degree at the University of Edmonton, while working for the Alberta government鈥檚 movie-rating agency, when she started thinking about what kids really have access to in terms of sexual content.
She discovered there was little or no research to guide policy. But she did know kids are naturally curious about sex and that it鈥檚 normal for them to want to get some pleasure from viewing or reading about it. So she decided to ask the kids directly.
Thompson surveyed 425 students in Grade 8, average age 13, in rural and urban Alberta. In the anonymous survey, 88 per cent of boys and 72 per cent of girls told her they had seen sexually explicit content online. And 35 per cent of boys said they had seen porn too many times to count.
But what they were seeing was a far cry from her generation鈥檚 famous porn film, Deep Throat.
Kids who hadn鈥檛 even had their first kiss, let alone their first sexual experience, were consuming hardcore violent porn on the Internet. Thompson found rural boys reported higher rates of exposure to explicit content than urban kids.
The survey also found there was little or no discussion of rules or enforcement by parents.
鈥淎nd so what there is is a big silence. We have kids living in absolutely media-saturated homes where they have easy access to sexually-explicit material and nobody talks to them about what they鈥檙e viewing,鈥� said Thompson. 鈥淎nd often the kid is the person who鈥檚 the most tech-savvy person in the home.
鈥淲e鈥檙e happy to accept all the conveniences that the Internet brings into our lives but there鈥檚 very little follow-up or discussion about what kids have access to. And parents are ill equipped. I don鈥檛 even know if parents know how to start broaching the difficult conversation.鈥�
Thompson worries about the long-term effects of exposure to hardcore pornography on a generation of kids who live in a hyper-sexualized culture and live their lives online.
鈥淥f course they鈥檙e going to be trying to learn about the 鈥榟ow to.鈥� How do you have sex? What does sex look like? There鈥檚 some pleasure in watching the sexual activity online.
And so they鈥檙e viewing sexual content with no context. So, if we鈥檙e letting pornography do the teaching without any follow-up discussion, I think we have no idea how we鈥檙e affecting the psycho-sexual development of the last two generations of kids who have come up and I think we鈥檙e doing them a terrible disservice.鈥�
Thompson says parents and teachers have to take over from the online porn providers and start talking about sex in a real way.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 know how we鈥檙e going to equip parents and teachers and caring adults in the community to talk to kids. But we have to start somewhere. Would you rather have your kid learning about sex from a big profit-driven machine that鈥檚 totally dehumanizing, or would you rather have caring people start conversations with them in the safe space of a classroom?鈥�
