Does porn harm teens?

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April 8, 2014 | Sex & Society

Does porn harm teens?

A recent article in the New York Times addresses the touchy topic of teen consumption of porn. There was a time when it was a lot easier for parents to monitor what their teenaged children watched on the Internet. But now with so many devices - phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and televisions - hooked up to the Web and so much porn freely available on tube and pirate sites, parents have little hope of preventing sexually curious teenagers from accessing explicit content online. The question, then, is has this new reality caused psychological harm to teens?

Two recent meta-studies -- one based in the US, the other in Great Britain -- fail to conclude that teens are harmed by watching porn.

Last May, the Children’s Commissioner for England released a report titled “Basically ... porn is everywhere,” which examined 276 research papers on teenagers and pornography. It was not able to establish a causal relationship between teen viewing of porn and risky sexual behavior, such as not using condoms or starting to have sex at an earlier age than they might otherwise.

The US meta study, "The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research,” was conducted by West Chester University in Pennsylvania and published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. It looked at over forty studies and also could not find conclusive evidence of negative consequences to teens watching porn.

However, researchers remain cautious. After all "neuroscience tells us that young minds are still forming and thus malleable, and they tend to respond to emotionally charged material in ways that adults don’t. Given that pornography is emotionally charged, it would be shocking if it had no impact."

Professor Miranda Horvath, one of the researchers behind the Children’s Commissioner report, says that parents should be teaching their kids about relationships and sex at a young age, "If we start teaching kids about equality and respect when they are 5 or 6 years old, by the time they encounter porn in their teens, they will be able to pick out and see the lack of respect and emotion that porn gives us. They’ll be better equipped to deal with what they are being presented with.”

At the very least, researchers recommend, the traditional "birds and the bees" conversation between parents and their adolescent kids must be revised and expanded to include a full and frank lesson on porn literacy.