By Dr. Gail Dines
Teens are watching more porn than ever before, and it looks nothing like your father’s Playboy! One of the most oft-quoted studies found that nearly 90 percent of the most watched porn videos had some form of violence against women in them. While this may be a surprise to many parents who perhaps imagine porn as merely a naked centerfold, it wasn’t to researchers like me who immerse ourselves in the world of mainstream porn. We know how widespread violent, degrading, and misogynist pornography has become, as well as the implications for the emotional, physical and mental health of young people.
Fearing for their children’s well-being, parents at Culture Reframed’s presentations, whether in Los Angeles, Oslo or Warsaw, want to run home in a panic to have the “porn talk” with their kids. But in reality, they often have no idea what to say, how to say it, or how to deal with a kid who would rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting across from their parents talking about porn. At the same time, public health research shows that parents are the first line of prevention in dealing with any major social problem that affects their kids.
So Culture Reframed brought together a team of academics, public health experts, educators, pediatricians and developmental psychologists to explore how we can prevent kids from being exposed to images of sexual abuse and degradation at that critical stage when they are forming their sexual identities?
What took shape were two 12-module programs, one for parents of tweens, and one for parents of teens, that introduce parents sequentially to the developmental changes – emotional, cognitive and physical – that tweens and teens undergo, and the hypersexualized pop culture that shapes those changes, and is the wallpaper of their lives.
The goal of our programs is to help parents develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence to have, not a porn talk, but multiple talks, with their kids on how to build resilience and resistance in their kids to porn. The final modules of each program are scripted conversations between a parent and a kid, on topics such as sexting, the harms of porn, bodily boundaries, and staying safe on social media.
While parents are crucial, studies have also found that the most effective way to prevent young people from accessing porn is a partnership between parents and schools. In surveys, students say that they want good sex education from both parents and teachers, and studies have found that when sex ed focuses on the harms of porn, young people are less likely to seek out such images.
Unfortunately, studies also show that few sex ed programs address the issue of porn, and many teachers feel ill-equipped to deal with this topic in class. For this reason, Culture Reframed is working with a team of sex educators to develop a robust set of materials on how to teach sex education with a porn-critical lens. On October 2nd and 3rd, we are holding the first virtual conference for parents and professionals, called Taking on Porn: Developing Resilience and Resistance Through Sex Education, that helps adults develop the skills necessary to support young people as they navigate the challenges of growing up in a porn-saturated culture.
But ultimately, the Culture Reframed project is about so much more than providing parents with newfound confidence and skills. It’s about taking power back from the porn industry, which is out to hijack the sexuality and humanity of kids in the name of profit, and giving it back to parents and those professionals tasked with bringing up healthy kids.
Dr. Gail Dines is a Professor Emerita of Sociology, and President of Culture Reframed, a non-profit dedicated to building resilience and resistance in young people to the harms of pornography. You can see her TEDx talk here.