Most American teens are watching porn, says disturbing report
By Thomas Lickona, Mercator.
Anybody who cares about the healthy sexual and character development of children should read the report, Teens and Pornography issued earlier this year by the organization Common Sense Media.
The report was based on a representative national survey of 1,300 teenagers ages 13 to 17. Some of its troubling findings:
- 73 percent of the respondents (75 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls) said they had watched online pornography. The average age they started was 12. Many began younger.
- Seven in 10 who admitted they had watched porn intentionally said they had done so in the past week.
- Four in 10 said they had watched pornography, including nudity and sexual acts, during the school day. Almost half said they had done so on school-owned devices.
- Of those who watched the past week, 80 percent said they had seen “what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain.”
Common Sense Media founder and CEO James Steyer, in his introduction to the Teens and Pornography report, said the findings should be a wake-up call to parents and other caregivers: “We need to consider conversations with teens about pornography the same way we think of conversations about sex, social media, drug and alcohol use, and more.”
The finding that teens said they had viewed “what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain” won’t surprise anyone who has read the book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality by Gail Dines, a Wheelock College sociology and women’s studies professor. In more than two decades of speaking and writing about pornography, Dines finds that most women and some men—including parents—have no clue how violent and misogynist hard-core online pornography has become.
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