And many parents, including myself, make a second mistake on pornography. They don’t really understand what these videos depict.
Violent, degrading and misogynist videos
“Parents often think that children look at softcore pornography, like Playboy Centerfolds,” explains Flood. But pornography today generally shows something else: “Men being cruel to women.”
“Sometimes it is verbal violence, with a hostile and derogatory language. Sometimes they are violent behavior, such as strangulation, slaps or suffocation, ”explains Flood. Several times, videos show that women appreciate this cruelty, no matter how violent or degrading it is. “It is not an appropriate form of sex education for our 8-year-old children or our 12-year-old children,” he adds.
This sexist and violent content is “routine”, says Flood. In a major study by the United Kingdom, researchers analyzed 50 of the most popular pornographic videos. About 90% of them showed manifest violence or aggressiveness, oriented to a overwhelming majority for women, have reported researchers in the journal Violence against women. In another study, researchers have analyzed more than 4,000 scenes from two main pornographic websites. About 40% of them included one or more acts of physical assault. “Spanking, gap, slaps, shooting and hair suffocation were the five most common forms of physical assault,” reported the researchers Sexual behavior archives.
Scientists are starting to understand how early exposure to this content can have an impact on children’s health and development, explains social specialist Brian Willoughby at Brigham Young University. For example, this can interfere with the learning of children on consent and the importance of respect in relationships.
“The gender dynamics displayed in these videos sets up really unhealthy expectations regarding intimacy and relationships,” explains Willoughby.
Studies also note that early exposure increases the risk of developing problematic use of pornography later in life. For young children, the explicit content can be quite overwhelming, shocking and shocking. “Their understanding of sex, in general, is very limited,” explains Willoughby. They therefore find it difficult to understand what they see or manage the emotions and physiological answers that it triggers in their brain and their body.
For some children, seeing explicit content can even be traumatic, explains Megan Maas to Michigan State University. In one of Maas’s studies, a man described what happened when he went to googled the word “pipe” in sixth year. “He ended up seeing a kind of pornography, called face abuse, which shows women gagging the penis,” explains Maas. “Women often cry, the mascara flows on their faces.”
The videos sparked a visceral reaction inside him that made him want to vomit. “Then he just closed sexually,” said Maas, “all the experience panicked him and really changed him.”
What parents can do
Over the past two years, 21 states have adopted laws forcing pornographic sites to check the age of a user. But each scientist interviewed for this story says that it is imperative for parents to implement protections inside your home.
Here are three measures to take.
Block the contents with your router.
One of the most powerful tools to protect children from pornography is already sitting inside your home: your router.
“As a parent, your router is the most important and underestimated digital device in your home,” explains Chris McKenna. He is the founder and CEO of the company Protect Young Eyes, who, over the past decade, has helped schools and churches to create safer digital spaces.
Your router acts as a door by which the Internet enters your home via wifi. You can, in a way, place a bouncer at the door of your wifi. You can block any website that you want to go through this door and reach devices that use WiFi. To do this, you can:
- Connect directly to your router via a browser and program it to block explicit websites. Some routers include parental commands; Some do not.
- Buy a device that connects to your router and filters unwanted content, such as Bark at Home or Aura.
OR
- Buy a router designed specifically to block pornographic content, such as Gryphon.
McKenna and his team tested these options and found that the third is the simplest and most efficient. But it’s expensive. A new router can cost up to $ 300.
“This router allows you to completely deactivate the Internet at certain times of the day or on certain devices with a telephone application,” he explains. “I could therefore be in Switzerland and control the entire network in my house.”
Add filters to cell devices, then also monitor
Clearly control your router will not stop all Explicit content of entry into your home. First and foremost, it will not stop the content of devices that use cell or mobile data, such as smartphones and tablets that receive cellular data.
This omnipresent access to explicit content on smartphones is a major reason why many psychologists and pediatricians recommend waiting for the eighth year or even later before giving a child a smartphone.
Another big problem is that explicit content is not limited to pornographic websites. Repeated surveys show that it often appears on social media platforms and video games intended directly for adolescents and younger children.
And, as Brian Willoughby of Byu points out, this will not prevent children from seeing pornography in a friend or a parent, or even in school on the phones of other children. “”The vast majority of young children access pornography for the first time through their friends, ”he says.
Thus, Willoughby and other scientists recommend using all filters and parental controls provided with devices and applications. But, he underlines, parents should know that these controls do not work well. “They are simply very easy to move,” he says. “I think too many parents light these filters and go away. It’s just not good enough. ”
Willoughby recommends parents to frequently monitor children’s activities on applications, games and social media. This does not mean being with the child whenever he uses his phone, but it means having access to their accounts and frequently watch their content. “See who they talk to and what they share,” he says. “It is just as important, if not more, than controlling your router, I think.”
“Children will put a lot of stories about this surveillance and talk about how” you are the only parent who does it, “said Willoughby. “What I always say to my children is:” I just love you more than these parents. “”
Teach children what to do when they meet overwhelming content
Finally, each child must be aware that he could trip in shocking photos and videos, frightening or overwhelming on the internet, says McKenna.
So teach children what to do when they meet this content. “In our organization, we teach children to” put it and say to someone, “he said. Then give the child a list of people they can say, including the parent, a grandparent or an older brother.
He then recommends practicing this action. “”Ask your child to sit at the kitchen counter with his device and say, “Listen, I want you to claim that you have seen something that makes you uncomfortable. I’m going to go to the room. I want you to close the Chromebook, bring it upstairs and tell me out loud: “Mom, I saw something that made me uncomfortable and I want to talk about it.” “”
This reconstruction gives you a chance to practice another critical competence. “Do not panic,” says McKenna. If you panic, the child could be reluctant to come back to you in the future, he said.
Instead, reassure the child that they are not in difficulty, they are safe and you love them in the same way, he said. You might say, “There is nothing on which you could click or look that would never change my way of you, darling. You are always my incredible child.“”
