Newsflash: Teens Want To Look At Porn

Behold: Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies, the Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States.

That’s a whole lotta capital letters, but if you skimmed over that last bit it didn’t matter much. The main thing is that a bunch of online companies and government bodies got together and tried to determine the *actual* risks to children, as opposed to all those hysterical, made up ones that usually get the headlines.

The summary has a number of interesting points. The one that stood out for me was this:

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The Internet increases the availability of harmful, problematic and illegal content, but does not always increase minors’ exposure. Unwanted exposure to pornography does occur online, but those most likely to be exposed are those seeking it out, such as older male minors.

Bing! There you have it. Teen boys like to look at porn. Knock me down with a feather. This is exactly the same result that Clive Hamilton is waving around with his “shocking” survey that revealed 84% of 16 and 17 year old boys have looked at porn online (and the other 16% were presumably lying). This is the report that inspired the mandatory filter plan that’s giving us all so much grief at present.

Of course teenagers look at porn. It’s what they do. The big question is whether they’re looking at porn for mere entertainment or if they’re seeing it as sex and gender education. If it’s the former, where’s the harm, really? If it’s the latter, well, we need to beef up our sex education programs to make sure kids know that porn is often quite, you know, dumb.

The report presented these other salient pieces of information:

Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors
face, both online and offline.

Much of the research based on law-enforcement cases involving Internet-related child exploitation predated the rise of social networks. This research found that cases typically involved post-pubescent youth who were aware (my italics) that they were meeting an adult male for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity.

Again, there it is. Those damned kids, those poor innocents that everyone is trying to protect, keep being stubbornly self-aware and sexual. How dare they!

I think we’d get a lot further with these discussions if people would stop being so shocked at the very idea of teenagers exploring porn or sexual situations and instead looked at ways to ensure that exploration has positive outcomes.

When it came to solutions, this is what the report said:

Careful consideration should be given to what the data show about the actual risks to minors’ safety online and how best to address them, to constitutional rights, and to privacy and security concerns.

Parents and caregivers should: educate themselves about the Internet and the ways in which their children use it, as well as about technology in general; explore and evaluate the effectiveness of available technological tools for their particular child and their family context, and adopt those tools as may be appropriate; be engaged and involved in their children’s Internet use; be conscious of the common risks youth face to help their children understand and navigate the technologies; be attentive to at-risk minors in their community and in their children’s peer group; and recognize when they need to seek help from others.

How ridiculously sensible. Who’d have thought it?

Of course, this is a US report. Here in Australia hysteria, misinformation, and religious agendas seem to be setting the tone of the debate about child safety and online censorship.