Why we need to talk about porn

Secondary school children could be taught about internet pornography. Here Lizi Patch talks from personal experience.
..
.

In March, my son told me he had watched something horrible online. Something sexual where the young women involved seemed coerced into an act that was brutal and disgusting, not just to an uninitiated 11-year-old but to anyone with a shred of humanity.

He watched it because one of his new friends told him he should – because it was “funny”. He was finding it hard to make friends at his new secondary school and wanted to fit in. He didn’t know what he was going to see. I know this because, from that day, I noticed my son becoming withdrawn. I knew something was wrong and asked several times if he was okay, clearly he wasn’t. A few days later, as I was saying goodnight to him and his younger brother, he said he had something to tell me. So we went into my bedroom and he told me everything. He said he had been horrified watching a short video online but was unable to stop thinking about it. He told me he couldn’t “unsee” it, and how he felt his childhood was effectively over. I tried to contextualise what he’d seen. He needed to make sense of it. So we talked about the porn industry and how often it portrays women as passive beings – actors or not, willing or otherwise.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

He knows the women in the video he saw are real people, forced into a deeply unpleasant situation and we talked about how very far from “funny” videos like these really are. We talked about why people might access porn, and that being curious is completely natural. We talk about the difference between titillation, healthy sex and the brutal moving images that he saw. The images he just doesn’t know where to file.

Young people have always found ways to discover the world on their own and that’s essential, but it’s our adult world that is increasingly seeping into their childhood, at the touch of a button. And when the mark of fitting in becomes watching a “funny” video – essentially brutal porn that changes your world in an instant – then I think we, as a society, need to reassess.

So how do we reassess? Since I first wrote about this experience on the Culture Vulture website I have been inundated with requests to speak on the radio, feature in print, appear on TV and invited to Westminster to discuss policy change with the Shadow Minister for Media and Communications.

I agreed to some. The ones that promoted discussion and change, rather than soap-boxing, censorship and sensationalism. But I’m no politician, and I’m no prude. I am both a parent and a theatre maker and I choose to examine the world we live in today and promote discussion based on presenting the facts and connecting emotionally to difficult subjects.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

My sons are the ones who will be making choices about how the online world progresses – right behind the late teens and early 20s who have grown up with the internet and who are busily creating and disseminating current content. They are not scared of it like many of the older generation are – their gut reaction is not to attempt the impossible task of banning stuff but to push curiosity to its limits. The internet is generally a wonderful thing; freedom of expression is vital but freedom is messy and censorship is a moving target. The people who make and disseminate porn are way ahead of the internet service providers, let alone the public. The “opt-in” system has a job on its hands – it’s not feasible to have perfect protection since those people who make and disseminate porn will simply keep generating new lingo, and people will still swap images between themselves via email, social networking, online cloud storage and other means that don’t require keywords to access in the first place. So we’re left with the great common denominator – our schools, education and discussion. I work with over 150 young people every week and I have a clear idea of the power of discussion.

We have the world at our fingertips and rather than prohibition and censorship, let’s drive a chunk of public money into training people to go into schools and have thoughtful and candid discussions with our young people so they can emotionally connect with the world we have made for them and make informed and healthy decisions about where they take it from here.

Sex education needs updating

Claire Perry, Conservative MP and one of David Cameron’s main advisers has called for children to be taught about “the negative impact of online pornography” in the classroom.

Her comments come as charity’s such as the NSPCC are calling for better sex education in schools.

The current sex education guidance is 13 years old and was published before the explosion in online pornography and social media.

Lizi Patch is a Yorkshire-based director, writer and animateur.