Pornography is accessible like it has never been before for anyone with an internet connection – and that includes adolescents. Kristina Chetcuti lays down the hard facts that many parents would probably prefer not to hear – but they would be doing their children no favours by pretending it didn’t exist.

The other day the five-year old son of a friend of mine got back home from school eager to tell his mother all about that day’s visit to an animal farm. He opened her laptop and happily started typing in the names of animals and showing his mother the images that were coming up. At one point he asked her: “Mummy how do you spell ‘cock’?” Half way through spelling it, his mother froze and snatched the laptop away.

“Just in time: the images that came up had nothing to do with farm animals – I don’t understand – because we’re meant to have filters on our internet at home,” my friend told me later.

This is the world we live in: where parents of young children are all the time worrying about accidental, unintended exposure to online pornography; and where parents of older children worry about the free availability of adult websites with shocking legal content.

The pornification of our media has been, slowly but surely, invading the minds of our children. I have a copy of the innocuous Vanity Fair magazine here on my table. On the cover there’s a raunchy-looking Katy Perry, at the back a full page ad featuring a half naked woman looking seductively at the camera.

The television is on MTV and as I type, from the corner of my eye, I can see Rihanna gyrating half-naked against a pole while mouth­ing her lyrics. I switch to Canale 5, there’s a window sealer promo on and a woman wearing a bra and pants is showing us how to fix a window using the sealer.

Erotic material is now no longer relegated to the top shelves or to grainy Sicilian channels. While my generation’s idea of sex was formed on what we read in books or from smuggled-in Playboy magazine, our children are exposed to a daily bombardment of sexual images, and fast becoming the X-rated generation. And this before we’ve even opened the can of porn.

Degrading porn is only a click away. Because it is so easily accessible, young teens – children of 12, 13, 14 years – go online for sexual information. The problem is that they are seeing adult material that up till 10 years ago would have only been accessible as a blue film from a DVD shop. Now all they have to do is google YouPorn or redTube – yes it is that accessible. And here is what they find: women with multiple men, looped scenes of women gagging through oral sex, spitting, hair pulling, slapping and verbal abuse. All for free. Do our children watch this? Yes.

Mary Ann Borg Cunen, who lectures on the psychology of sexuality at the University of Malta, says that from her clinical experience many young people she sees mention having watched porn in the past – or still do. “Some, maybe one out of every 10, talk at length about watching porn in their childhood and adolescence, and that it had an effect of them. The effect they mention is a negative one. These range from feeling they have become addicted to more and more violent and exploitative porn, to disclosing that, as children they tried to imitate the scenes they saw in porn films with their friends, and that this had a negative effect on them,” Ms Borg Cunen says.

Degrading porn is only a click away. Because it is so easily accessible, young teens – children of 12, 13, 14 years – go online for sexual information

Even more worrying is the attitude of the students she lectures who seem to blur fantasy and reality. “The students I work with often think that women behave like the ones they see in porn films. When they try and act in these ways in reality they cannot understand why this does not work,” she says.

Studies in the UK confirm that teens think pornographic hardcore scenes are normal and they try and copy them when they take their first steps in sexual activity. In the study by TeenBoundaries, many teens believe that women fantasise about being raped; that women don’t have pubic hair, because porn stars don’t have any; that anal sex is the norm.

Let us not for a moment delude ourselves that in Malta porn is not leaving its dark impact. In a 2005 survey, the National Statistics Office revealed that all students aged between 13-16 years use the internet regularly, with 25 per cent of these being unsupervised. The study also showed that 25.6 per cent of these teens access websites and/or chat rooms which contain violent content and/or pornography.

Eight years down the line, these figures are bound to have increased. Perhaps the Children’s Commissioner Helen D’Amato would do well to commission a survey of her own so that we may have some crucial facts in hand. Meanwhile we have to rely on feedback from people of different professions.

Talk to beauticians in Malta and they’ll all tell you that the demand for ‘Brazilian wax’ among younger women is on the rise. “I have several 18-year olds coming over to wax all, and they say outright that it’s because their boyfriends can’t bear the sight of pubic hair,” one beautician said.

Talk to Personal and Social Development teachers and they will tell you how teenagers in secondary schools talk about anal sex as a safe way for not getting pregnant.

“Our concern is that some students seem to believe without question what they are seeing on these websites and they are having unrealistic expectations about the opposite sex.

They are assuming that what they are seeing in pornography is reality,” says Tizziana Bugeja, of the Malta PSD Association.

When students watch pornography they may get incorrect perceptions of what is normal and what is not normal, what is acceptable and what is not, particularly in a context where pornography lacks the relationship element and when violence is linked with sexual acts, she says.

PSD teachers in Malta see this all the time, and the situation is “alarming” in secondary schools. “From our everyday experience with children we are becoming aware that students are being exposed to pornography at a younger age, especially since students tend to be more computer literate than their parents,” she says.

3G mobiles make it even more difficult for parents to exert their control on what children are being exposed to, she adds.

Essentially, violent and sadistic imagery is readily available to very young children and even if they do not go searching for it and if at home the use of internet is supervised, their friends may show it to them or they may stumble on it.

This newspaper spoke to two young men who started watching porn at 14. “I started as a lark at first but within a year I was addicted and it warped my behaviour. Every girl I dated, I kept myself detached – it was like I was seeing girls with different glasses on. It all felt very robotic, no life,” says Andrew*.

“When I had sex for the first time, I was shocked – it was nothing like I had seen. I was completely disappointed. It took me years to wean myself off porn and to start appreciating women as they really are,” says James*.

Who is telling children that porn sex is exaggerated and it’s nothing like the real thing? Recently Social Dialogue Minister Helena Dalli, writing in Times of Malta, made a passionate plea on the importance of educating children on pornography. She hinted at the prolific use of porn sites in Malta saying that while global traffic ranking for the website Xhamster free porn videos stands at 44, Malta’s is higher at 37.

She stressed that the PSD school syllabus must include pornography and its effect on relationships.

However, the truth is that porn education is already part of the PSD curriculum. Indeed, the Maltese PSD syllabus is deemed by foreign PSD teachers as one of the best in Europe.

Pornography is discussed in the Form 2 syllabus, where 12-year-old students are encouraged to understand the influence of media on young people particularly on body images and sexualized images. At this age children start spending less time with their family and more time with their friends and this is when peer pressure kicks off.

Sexual deviant behaviours such as prostitution, pornography and fetishes are then discussed again in Form 5. Apart from this, PSD teachers have the professional liberty to deal with issues that arise during lessons so the topic is often discussed in other forms should the need arise. The lessons are crucial because students need a safe and non-judgmental place were they can communicate, discuss and reflect on sexuality, emotions and relationships.

“We do believe that this topic should perhaps be included formally in other sections of the PSD syllabus, but for this to be done one needs to increase the number of PSD lessons in the curriculum,” said Ms Bugeja. At the moment secondary students have one PSD lesson per week.

Ideally it is not just the schools and the PSD teachers which do all the work. Parents also need to play their part. However, a 2006 evaluation research by Maud Muscat showed that communication about sexuality by Maltese parents seemed to be lacking as “they feel more comfortable to let someone else discuss sexuality matters”.

The PSD Association and PSD Education Officers always insist on parent meetings before they tackle sexuality lessons with the children. However at times, this is either not possible, or not enough. The PSD Association has long been recommending the organisation of professional parenting skills courses to concentrate on the barrier between parents and their children in discussing sexuality matters.

Ms Borg Cunen says that parents can and do influence children. “There is far more to sex than what is portrayed in porn and children need to hear this. Sex should be portrayed as a beautiful thing… a language of love, not a way to control and dominate.

 

Breakdown of porn content

The academic journal Violence Against Women analysed 300 porn scenes, of these:

88.2 per cent contained physical aggression.
48.7 per cent contained verbal aggression.

The perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female.

 

“Of course the talk has to be accompanied by the walk, and parents must themselves refrain from using porn in a way their children can find them out,” she says.

Many of her students, she says, started off on their “porn career” watching what their father had left lying around, or hidden in­adequately, be it in the form of DVDs or clips on the computer.

Education officers routinely recommend that internet-connected devices should be on the kitchen table and not in a child’s bedroom, so parents can always have an idea of what their children are up to. However, parents and schools alone are still not enough. One school teacher in a girls’ secondary school said that online porn accessed on mobile phones is changing the relationship culture and raising issues for young girls in particular.

The bottom line is that we need more technical feasibility to restrict young people’s access to pornography. The Government has to make it a lot harder to access. Minister Dalli could do well to take a leaf out of the recommendations of her British equivalent, who is strongly advocating with internet service providers that filtering systems should be on by default. Other adult users will just have to change the settings.

How should parents tackle this ‘hot’ topic?

By Stephen Camilleri, Education Officer

“We are all sexual beings and therefore parents should start talking about sexuality from an early age so that they can provide an environment where children can have the opportunity to explore their own values and attitudes about their sexuality and develop a positive outlook about it.

Parents have to take every opportunity that presents itself to teach their children about life, growing up, feelings and different relationships. They can do so in an informal way, through stories or discussion when seeking a film, birth of a puppy or kitten and so on.

The best protection from the psychological harm due to repetitive exposure to pornography is a loving, nurturing and affirming formative environment for the child and learner, both at home and at school.

Home-school links should ensure that such an environment is promoted and supported in every way possible.”

How is pornography taught at school?

By the Malta PSD Association

“The role of the teacher is mainly to challenge the students’ view about pornography so that they realise that pornography gives a distorted view about sex and sexuality.

We help them distinguish between reality and fantasy, since these two become enmeshed after continual exposure to pornographic videos or pictures.

Pornography is also given a lot of importance when addressing media education. In this case, PSD teachers together with students try to criticise pornography and discuss the effects they have on individuals and future relationships.

Teachers give appropriate information according to the students’ age so that they are able to cope with the information they are being presented with. The information is based on research and is not taught out of context but within the concept that sex needs to be part of a relationship. We also try to instil healthy positive attitudes towards their bodies and towards sex.”