The media last week was full of comment and reports that the National Association of Head Teachers had called for children to be taught about porn as part of the sex education lessons (see, for example, this report on the BBC News website). Inevitably this was misinterpreted in some quarters as something of tremendous danger to young children, as if the intention was to corrupt them and warp their understanding of the world by placing them in front of uninterrupted scenes from hard core porn movies for hours on end, and leaving it to them to work out what was right and what wasn’t.
I preferred to interpret it differently, namely as a call to pre-empt the almost inevitable, ie that children will see porn at some stage in their teenage lives, and we as their parents and teachers should prepare them to reject its harmful elements, and to put it into a values-laden context. A significant proportion of children will view porn, sometimes by accident and sometimes because through curiosity they have sought it out; they are often not prepared, however, for the fact that it can prove distressing and damaging, and they are certainly not prepared – given the vast weight of sexualised material they see around them every day – to be able to distinguish that women in porn are overwhelmingly presented in an objectified manner.
So – forewarned is forearmed. I have already started to explain to my pre-teen eldest child that there are bad things on the internet, and that despite the filters we put in place to stop this stuff getting through, he may encounter inappropriate images. I am trying to give him strategies – not to be afraid to tell, to navigate away from sites, to recognise that this is not real, and that the way in which women are portrayed is harmful to both men and to women, because everyone should be equal in the world. I am starting to explain that this is not always about love, which is what all great relationships should be built on.
There is of course a danger in telling children about porn – ie that they will go and actively seek it out. But no parent or school can ever protect children forever from the fact that bad things happen, and that women are presented in degrading ways in the internet. At least by preparing our children to know that it exists, to know that it is unreal, and to know that it can be extremely harmful to women, we stand a chance of being able to communicate to children that this is not what sex is all about, and we have the opportunity to share some of our values around sex, love, and how men and women should be treated equally in all aspects of life.
