It May Be Illegal

Section 12 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 makes it a criminal offence to cause a child to watch a sexual act. http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/soa_2003_and_soa_1956/#a25 In order for an offence to be committed, the purpose of the act would have to be to gain sexual gratification. If it was clear that the images (which count under the Act) were shown for educational purposes then it may not be seen as illegal, but I for one would not risk it. Additionally, if someone were to get this close to the line of what is legal or not then I think we may be prettttty much on the line of ‘right/not right’.

Consent

Although many young people want more and better sex and relationships education, a significant number of people don’t want any. Whenever I teach SRE in schools (and I do teach about porn in schools, more about this later) I reckon up to a third of students don’t want to be there. Although parents can choose to remove their child from SRE classes, students often can’t remove themselves. I think they should be able to to be honest and I would like to see schools make accommodations for this. However, schools being what they are means it’s hard to allow students to leave a lesson and go and do their thing in the library.

Sensitive sex educators (-ahem-) find ways to make all students feel comfortable by doing small group work, distanced learning, scenarios, self-facilitation, card sorts, group agreements and incorporate consent within lessons by allowing students to opt out of activities but still remain in the lesson.

If teaching students about porn meant showing them porn, we would be showing them sexual images without their consent. It would be very difficult for students to remain in the room and not look at or hear the porn. If they were allowed to leave because they didn’t want to look at porn then they wouldn’t be getting any porn education at all.

Power

Think also about the power dynamics going on here (as we should always do when we are talking about consent). If you are a young person and a teacher said “okay, I’m going to show you porn but you don’t have to look or you can leave if you really want to” would you feel confident enough to leave? What if, as a guy, you received the message growing up that if you want to be a man you need to be interested in sex (and that you have to want to be a man at all costs) would you be able to leave at that point? Think about the messages young women receive about sex? Think of the bullying they might receive if they left or stayed?

So it would be very very difficult to ensure that everyone watching the porn would be actively consenting to be there. Doing a non-consensual thing in order to teach young people about consent (among other things) doesn’t sound too ethical to me. However, it’s also not really ethical to the producers and the performers. They have consented to adults watching (and purchasing) their material – but not students in a school.

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It would be making people watch sex

Although people watch porn for lots of different reasons, watching porn can be and often is a sexual act. Even if someone starts watching porn for non-sexual reasons it can soon become a sexual thing. One could argue that people can be turned on by many different things and porn is no different to say Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Toni Morrison. By definition porn’s intention is to sexually arouse people, this is what makes it different to other media. Even if we were to say “okay, we’re going to watch porn now but it’s not for a sexual reason and we really shouldn’t get turned on” can we honestly not reasonably expect that some won’t be experiencing this as a sexual activity?

Watching porn = having sex?

Which means that if we were to show young people porn, we are potentially making them have sex – against their will. Furthermore, other people in the room being potentially sexually aroused would also be a sexual act for other people – again, against their will. This is wrong on so many different levels, even for the students who may be enthusiastic about the idea.

Do I really have to spell this out? Just as not everyone is interested in sex education, not everyone is interested in porn (depending on the age group, this might actually be most young people), not everyone is interested in sex – either as a young person or ever. We’d be making people take part in a sexual act, which as I’ve already established, would be extremely difficult to make consensual.

So all in all I think it’s pretty unethical, immoral, unjustifiable, and (may even be) unlawful to show young people porn in sex and relationships classes in school.

Would this be a good thing to do with adults?

Let’s take this a bit further. Say I was running a series of sex and relationships education classes for adults (actually wanna do this). Like upstairs in a pub, once a week, for a couple of hours, over a course of six weeks. I would charge and would clearly advertise that we were going to chat about sex, gender, sexuality, porn, relationships, consent and stuff. Everyone coming would be consenting adults who were paying to come and talk about porn. Would I show them porn? No, I don’t think I would because of ethics but also because I don’t think it would be useful.

Consent

For a start the same consent issues arise above. If I’m going to be running a course then I have power. Even if I flagged it up and said “okay, in week three I’m going to be showing you some carefully curated pornography – feel free not to come to that one,” how much pressure might people feel in coming to week three? Aside from the fact that they might not get their full value for money they may also: have massive FOMO; they might want to please me; they might worry about what other group members might feel about them; they may feel like they have to prove something about how cool or ‘sex positive’ they are.

Similarly I would also be asking the group to potentially take part in a sexual activity with each other even as I was framing it as an educational experience. Similar ethical concerns (as well as concerns around efficacy, more on this in a minute) surround porn research where participants are put in front of screens, shown porn and either wired up and/or asked questions to ascertain what ‘effect’ it may have had on them (wrong question, more on this in a bit). For example leading academics in this field Professor Feona Attwood http://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/attwood-feona and Professor Clarissa Smith http://www.crmcs.sunderland.ac.uk/research-staff/clarissa-smith/ opt for the more ethical (and more interesting) approach of asking people what they do with the sexual media and cultures they are experiencing. More on this in a bit too.

Why – to show people how to do ‘it’?

What are the reasons why we might want to show porn to adults as part of sex and relationships education? To show people how to have sex? There are some things which porn teaches well and some things which porn teaches not so well. Professor Alan McKee assesses contribution that porn makes in educating young people about healthy sexual development (link). He argues that porn is deficient at teaching about relationship skills, negotiation and consent. The nature of porn is that it doesn’t show the complex and difficult conversations necessary to have enjoyable sex (this isn’t what porn does) and so “[i]n short, pornography makes sex look easy.”

Most people know that how people have sex in porn isn’t a good guide to how people have sex IRL. Even all the year 10s I work with on porn know that – just as Grand Theft Auto is not a very useful source for learning about driving, pedestrians safety, ethics of treating sex workers, career advice and how to conceal deadly weapons – porn is not a great sex education tool. The lights are on. The positions taken up are to show bodies. Consent is often not very obvious. Safer sex precautions are not demonstrated (as safer sex in porn is about regular testing, which is obviously not shown in porn #noprop60).

Doing ‘it’

If we were to show people porn to show them ‘how to do it’ what porn would we even use? Hell, what do we even mean by porn here? Images, videos, audio, written? Would we show straight porn, gay porn, feminist porn, porn for couples, porn with disabled people in, BBM, MF, MMF, FFM, FF, FMFMFMFM, MMMMMMMF, queer porn, porn with trans folk in? What acts would they depict? Would it be PIV, PIA, oral, masturbation, frotting, kink, DS, SM, custard (actual custard), massage, squirting ….

I feel like there’s an idea that there is some perfect porn out there that would show loving and kind sex: fact is, all of the above can show that. It’s possible to engage in all of these kinds of sex with someone in a loving and respectful way. And who says that all sex has to be loving and kind – so long as it’s consensual? It’s also possible to engage in all of these activities in ways which aren’t consensual too.

Common sense sex

The showing people how to ‘do it’ aspect of this troubles me a lot, because what do we mean by ‘it’. There’s a very clear script for what society says ‘counts’ as sex. Kissing->clothes off->’foreplay’->penetrative sex. One thing leads to another. Always in the same order. We see this in a lot of porn but also in TV, film, books, sex advice but also sex and relationships education (think about what you were taught about ‘virginity’, ‘safer sex’ and when you should do ‘it’).

When we try to teach a particular way of doing sex we often just end up reinforcing this idea of ‘normal,’ which excludes so many people and many of everyone else finds so restricting that they don’t actually enjoy sex. It also contributes to the non-consensual culture we have around sex: sex is something one person does to another, not with another, and if you aren’t doing a particular kind of sex you aren’t really doing it at all.

Why – to critique porn?

So if it’s not about showing how to do it, do we want to show people porn so that they can critique it? Many people argue that we ask people to critique other forms of media by showing it to them, or asking them to read it in class. Perhaps. When I read the Wife of Bath for A-Level I had to do most of the reading at home – we don’t have time to sit and go through it all line by line.

Also, even if we did have time to read it all together that would be the same context in how people experience this media. The Wife of Bath (like a lot of texts in English Lit) was written at a time when most people couldn’t read – stories were read to people. It was a social group activity. Reading together in a class would pretty much resemble how such media was meant to be read. Similarly if we were watching a film in class or a TV show, it would be pretty much how we might do this outside of the classroom.

Context is key

Watching porn has a very different and unique context which is part and parcel of what porn is. Take it out of that context and it is a very different source. Looking at/reading/listening to porn, for most people, is a private activity. It’s an activity which involves a very specific and complicated relationship between the viewer and the source. It’s an active relationship: switching from clip to clip; fast forwarding, rewinding, pausing; imagining being in the scene or not; experiencing arousal, or not; an opportunity to reflect on our own desires, identities and behaviours, or not; and, crucially, having the opportunity to wank. Taking porn out of that context and watching it with other people changes the source, because the active context, the how we actually might watch porn, is an integral part of it.

Studying porn is different to watching it

If I were to have a porn module in my sex and relationships education course for adults above a pub (6.30 – 8.00 Tuesdays, Soho somewhere) I would ask participants to do some homework. To watch whichever porn (or any images they might enjoy of a sexual or sensual nature) they like and then ask them to think about some questions which may help them to critically evaluate what was going on. They could start with what was happening in the scenes. Was there anything problematic going on? How did they depict gender or sexuality? Was there any kink?

I would also ask them to think about what was going on for them. Were they watching the scene or imagining they were in the scene? If so who were they? What attracted them to that character? To reflect on their own desires but also their own identities …. That would be interesting right? And much more interesting than just showing one or two clips through my projector whilst everyone felt just soooo awkward. This is what the leading porn researchers do – they ask what people do with porn. Because porn (as with any media) is a much more complicated thing than ‘stimulus causes the effect’.

What we see is not the effect

Often when people talk about porn and young people they conflate what is contained in the images and the messages that they might send out with the effect that this has on people. In short – if we see something, we might want to do that ourselves. If we see someone with shaved pubes we might shave our pubes. If we see someone behaving non-consensually we might behave non-consensually.

This is not how young people, or anyone, consumes/interacts with porn or any media. As Clare Bale wrote “Young people draw upon their own experiences and emerging identities to interpret the media and employ broader values such as trust and mutual respect to formulate their attitudes, beliefs and values in their readings of media texts.” Raunch or Romance It’s an active process. Young people aren’t passive sponges. We already know this in research but we already know this when it comes to other media.

If we want to teach anyone about this we could ask them to reflect on any other media they may encounter – just as I do with young people in my Grand Theft Auto example from above. It’s pretty straightforward and we can demonstrate this and learn this without having to watch porn in the classroom.

Do we even really need to teach about porn?

So I feel like I’ve made a pretty good fist of explaining why I don’t think we should be showing people porn in an educational setting. It’s fraught with problems around consent and ethics but also wouldn’t be very useful or valuable even if we were able to do it consensually and ethically. But, do we even really need to teach about porn at all? Many young people don’t look at porn or even see sexual images – many more people play games, watch youtube clips, watch TV or read YA fiction, why not address the effect these kinds of media may have?

The reason that porn is a problem isn’t that porn is necessarily a problem in and of itself (though it can be used in problematic way), it’s that it shows most of the SRE available to young people and adults in this country as being waaaaaaay out of touch, not real enough and not relevant enough. If you want to, it is possible to teach about porn without showing people porn: many many people do this. Using discussion games, real life scenarios, distanced learning approaches and creative methods. My teaching pack, ‘Planet Porn’ has been around for years and is my biggest selling resource. Go buy it!

Why porn isn’t the biggest issue

However, just teaching porn in one isolated lesson (which I often get asked to do) isn’t going to teach young people a great deal about what it is they need to learn in order to be able to have healthy, nurturing and consensual sex and relationships (if they want them). So what should we do? Teach people (young people and adult people) about that stuff. About their relationship with themselves; self-care; what is expected of them and how to deal with inequality; how to do different kinds of relationships (friends, family, romance, self, pets, religion, humankind); how to treat people consensually and how to communicate; how to manage risks of sex and relationships. If you want to see what that kind of sex and relationships education looks like head to www.dosreforschools.com – it’s free and co-written by me.

If we can give people awesome SRE we don’t even really have to teach about porn – because they will already be equipped to work it out for themselves and not in the classroom neither.

For a summary of the evidence around porn go check this post out from moi.

Also me and Meg-John Barker turned this into an academic paper.

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Does Porn Have a Harmful Effect on Young People?

Many people worry that porn can cause young people harm. However there are many complexities with the evidence relating to porn. Also the question itself of porn causing an affect is problematic.

Research into the effects that porn has on young people is very very difficult to conduct because of the ethical issues of asking young people under 18 to look at sexually explicit materials (SEM). Studies which have been conducted in this area are longitudinal. So they ask people over 18 about their past experiences or research into non-explicit exposures of sexuality.

Two literature reviews into the research into porn and young people (by commissioned by Ofcom and the Office for the Children’s Commissioner) found studies which demonstrated association between porn consumption and attitudes and values:

“greater sexual permissiveness; stronger support for recreational sex; stronger beliefs that women are sex objects; stronger belief in instrumental attitudes to sex; greater sexual uncertainty; higher endorsement of uncommitted sex; lower sexual satisfaction; higher sexual preoccupation; earlier sexual activity; a greater number of sexual partners; higher probability of anal intercourse.”

What do we mean by ‘harm’

Some of these are pretty subjective measures which some people may see as problematic and others may not. One of the criticisms of many people researching porn is that the measures of ‘harm’ are simply ‘non-normative’ sex values. Sex which is not in the context of a monogamous, committed and (presumably) heterosexual relationship.

“This kind of research also often rests on an implicit and moralistic view of certain kinds of sex – especially sex which is commodified, casual or kinky – as morally wrong or socially problematic.” Feona Attwood 2011

In addition to the outcomes being measured as being potentially problematic and moralistic the effects also very small. According to the Ofcom review: “Typically, exposure to sexually explicit material might account for no more than 1-2% of the variance in sexual attitudes“. This means that there may have been other factors which might be having an effect on this variance in attitudes between people who do and don’t consume porn which haven’t been tested. This is backed up by another piece of research which shows that the effects of watching sexually explicit materials are small but should be read in with other factors which are likely to influence sexual behaviour:

“Our data suggest that other factors such as personal dispositions — specifically sexual sensation seeking — rather than consumption of sexually explicit material may play a more important role in a range of sexual behaviors of adolescents and young adults, and that the effects of sexually explicit media on sexual behaviors in reality need to be considered in conjunction with such factors,” Does Viewing Explain Doing

Causal link between porn and harm

Furthermore there isn’t a proven causal link between porn and these attitudes. As the authors of the Sexualization Report point out, there are associations between consumption of porn and smoking – however an association does not mean something causes another. People may have these attitudes in order to be drawn to watching porn, so there could be a change in attitudes as a result of watching porn, or it could be that there isn’t. Or someone who is interested in porn may have some of these attitudes in the first place “Or it could be that there is a reciprocal relationship between the two.”

Recent government policy which tries to restrict young people’s access to porn, because it is making young men coerce young women into anal sex, is based on a false conclusion from research. The point is made very clearly in this article by Cicely Marston, one of the authors of the report.

What Young People Do With Porn

Trying to tease out whether porn has an effect on young people is problematic because the effects or ‘risk’ are very subjective and moralistic, the effects are very small and can’t usefully be separated from other influences and studies can’t demonstrate the porn causes any effect.

Many researchers think that it’s more useful to go further than looking at whether this media is harmful per se and to consider how people consume sexually explicit materials, why they view them, how they view their experience, to what extent they are critical viewers and in what way they feel it affects them.

Active vs passive

Young people aren’t passive consumers of any media. Media literacy is something that children pick up from a very early age. For instance by the age of 5 they will know that what they see on the TV is sometimes real and sometimes made up. (Link page 15). The work of David Buckingham and Sara Bragg in the area of young people, media and sexually explicit materials suggests that young people are not passively exposed to sexually explicit materials but are critical and literate and that this material ‘an occasion for individuals to scrutinise their own desires, conduct and responses.’ Link

As Clare Bale wrote “Young people draw upon their own experiences and emerging identities to interpret the media and employ broader values such as trust and mutual respect to formulate their attitudes, beliefs and values in their readings of media texts.” Raunch or Romance

Not all use of porn is for the same reason either. Some young people are exposed to porn without their consent (pop-ups, email links etc), others are curious about what porn is and just have a quick look, others look because some of it is funny or shocking, some to rebel, some to learn and some to be sexually aroused by.

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Most young people aren’t looking at porn

It’s important to remember that not all young people watch/consume/have been exposed to sexually explicit materials. The EU Kids Online project found that in 2010, in the UK, 24% of 9 – 16 year olds reported seeing a sexual image with 11% of those seeing an image online. By 2014, in a comparison report called Net Children Go Mobile, this figure, for the same age group was 17% seeing a sexual image anywhere with 12% reporting seeing a sexual image online.  

Sexual image in the EU Kids Online reports was defined as “pictures, photos, videos. Sometimes, these might be obviously sexual – for example, showing people naked or people having sex.” The most frequent source of these images in the 2010 and 2014 reports was television – which does not usually depict the same sexual imagery or representations as are shown in hardcore pornography (e.g. close ups of genitals, actual rather than simulated sex). This (really interesting and important) article points out that many young people (for the 2014 report) will have seen sexual imagery on Game of Thrones (as well as very violent imagery).

What kinds of sexually explicit images?  

Even in studies of older young people and not all of this would have featured hardcore pornography (scenes with people shown having sex) and only a small minority would have featured BDSM or scenes portraying violence (according to this study of Dutch young people <10% of 15-25 year olds).

According to EU Kids Online 24% of children in the UK were upset by sexual images they had seen but this represents just 3% of all 9-16 year olds who use the internet in the UK. Girls and younger children are more likely to be upset by images that they see. Their response is typically to close the image down and to tell either a parent or a friend about what they’ve seen. Older teens are less likely to be upset by them.

[For an updated version of these stats try my Porn Quiz as part of the Teach Yourself Sex Ed series at BISH]

Media literacy

This all suggests that rather than being exposed to harmful images, young people are actively filtering and developing their own understanding of text which is concomitant with an increased interest in sex and their own emergent identities. Young people are perhaps setting their own rules for what they are ready for and if they see something they don’t like they switch off and/or they talk it through with someone – just as they might with any media which they may find upsetting.

This academic article ‘Whose concerns? Young adults discussing (their) concerns with pornography’ is very interesting. Often drilling down to how young people themselves feel about porn is very difficult because the topic of porn is surrounded by all of the above arguments, discourses, and ‘common sense’ ideas. This can result in a third person effect, where people say that it hasn’t affected them but they worry about other people. Young people do this but I also think that adults (including many sex educators and teachers) do this. The research in this paper found that young people had a really nuanced, reflexive view of their relationship to porn and found that it was a site of learning and unlearning, which is interesting. What we actually need is much better literacy about sexually explicit materials (that aren’t always porn).

So the answer is…

So what’s the answer? Good SRE of course! If we teach really good SRE then we don’t even have to teach about porn. If we give young people the opportunity to be critical of media, to understand how we do and don’t get power in relationships, to think about choice and agency then we are giving young people their own built in filters.

For free resources on how to deliver great SRE, check out the DO… SRE for Schools resources.

This piece is taken from Planet Porn, a resource pack for teaching young people about porn. It’s available in the Big Bish Download.

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According to the Guardian, Ed Vaizey MP, Communications Minister, is set to talk with leading internet service providers in the UK about changing the way that pornography ‘enters’ UK homes. At the moment any internet customer can access any legal pornography. They would have to use filtering controls such as Cybersitter or Bumpercar if they wanted to prevent children and young people from accessing pornographic or sexually explicit materials.

Now first and foremost I’m worried about what effect this is going to have on me and on my websites. Look around. Look how much the word porn is used. In a sex and relationships education website aimed at teens it would be pretty remiss of me not to tackle porn head on. If you look here, you’ll see loads of posts about porn which aim to give young people the knowledge, skills and values to enable them to be critical about porn and sexy imagery. Often broad brush approaches to filtering mean that sites like mine are also affected, which would mean that young people would not be able to access my site.

So far so me me me.

However even if it wasn’t going to have an effect on me I’d still be very dubious about whether this would work at all.

Evidence

There is very little reliable evidence about the extent to which young people are watching sexually explicit materials and whether there any harms for children and young people in viewing such material.

Yes there was that ropey research in Psychologies magazine which involved one secondary school  and there was that You Gov poll conducted for an entertainment television programme about young people and porn called ‘The Sex Education Show’

However even the briefest look on Google Scholar will show you that there is not a lot of rigorous academic research in this area. Arguments about porn, such as arguments about sexualisation, are usually values rather than evidence based. There is certainly no consensus in the academic world about young people and porn.

I would encourage you to read what I believe (I’m a practitioner, not an academic) to be the most thorough recent paper http://www.springerlink.com/content/c1k7r32gj9q72248/ It points out the lack of evidence of the extent of porn consumption and harms from previous research. In their own work the authors find that the effects on individuals may in some cases be negative, but that these are very small effects.

Some small qualitative studies suggest that porn can be harmful to young people , whilst others suggest that it can have beneficial effects.

In my view, as a practitioner, there is not enough evidence to suggest that porn is being used extensively by young people and there is not enough evidence to suggest that porn is harmful or beneficial for young people. Certainly there isn’t enough evidence to base government policy on it.

Sex Education

What all academic research into porn seems to agree is that there needs to be more research into porn, but also more sex education about porn (da, daaaa!). There is a lot of concern about the consumption of pornography by young people, which may be driven more by personal and anecdotal experience, rather than be grounded in robust academic evidence. Preventing access to websites such as mine, which aim to provide this education, has obvious problems.

Sex education needs backing. It needs incentives for teachers to teach it, it needs money for specialist workers, training and resources and some also think it needs to be on the National Curriculum. We await the results of the education and public health white papers from the coalition on this, however the mood music I am hearing is not filling me with hope.

Porn Lock Is Unlikely To Prevent Access

Some young people really want to watch porn. Some are curious but aren’t really into it and some ‘are exposed’ to it.

Porn is available on phones via bluetooth, on the telly (Babestation, freeview adult channels for example), but also in magazines, national newspapers and candid sexual shots of celebrities (on the Daily Mail website). Porn and sexually explicit materials are still going to be available, except, under these proposals, sites like mine but also other sex bloggers who critique porn are not going to be available. So we’ll still have the problem but with no access to many of the tools to help solve it.

In my view internet controls need to remain in the hands of the parents, not ISPs. Parents and carers can have more control and can decide which sites they want to exclude or include in their filters. I’m sure that ISPs will feel the same way.

For further reading, read this excellent excellent article by Dr Petra

Read this excellent article by Violet Blue http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/britain-considers-isp-filters-to-save-the-children-flawed-logic/14978?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechBroiler+%28Tech+Broiler%29

This is also an interesting take on the situation from Ms Naughty

Also thanks to @robmanuel and @quietriot_girl who have been campaigning about this on twitter today.

Thoughts? Comments?

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