Kids at greater risk of seeing online Internet porn than ever

According to a report called ‘Taking on the Internet Porn Industry’, and a report from the Pediatrics Journal, kids are at greater risk of being exposed to online porn than ever before, giving parents a tougher time than ever in keeping their kids safe online.

The ‘Taking on the Internet Porn Industry’ report from ‘The Third Way’ has some pretty stark facts on the online porn industry and how it is targeting young children.

According to the report:

- The most frequent viewers of Internet porn are kids 12-17 years old.
- The average age at which children are first exposed to online pornography today is 11 years old.
- Certain Internet pornography producers imbed children’s words like Teletubbies and Pokemon as “meta-tags” to drive kids to their sites.
- Approximately 20 new children appear on pornography sites every month, many of them kidnapped and sold into sex.

This follows news reports from Reuters and the Associated Press that the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics is set to unveil a report in their now-available February edition that “Unwanted and Wanted Exposure to Online Pornography in a National Sample of Youth Internet Users”.

An abstract of the report is available, written by Janis Wolak, JD, Kimberly Mitchell, PhD and David Finkelhor, PhD.

According to the abstract, the objective of the study “was to assess the extent of unwanted and wanted exposure to online pornography among youth Internet users and associated risk factors”, and was conducted via a telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 1500 youth Internet users aged 10 to 17 years was conducted between March and June 2005.

The results are startling. According to the abstract, “Forty-two percent of youth Internet users had been exposed to online pornography in the past year. Of those, 66% reported only unwanted exposure. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was used to compare youth with unwanted exposure only or any wanted exposure with those with no exposure”.

The abstract continues that: “Unwanted exposure was related to only 1 Internet activity, namely, using file-sharing programs to download images. Filtering and blocking software reduced the risk of unwanted exposure, as did attending an Internet safety presentation by law enforcement personnel. Unwanted exposure rates were higher for teens, youth who reported being harassed or sexually solicited online or interpersonally victimized offline, and youth who scored in the borderline or clinically significant range on the Child Behavior Checklist subscale for depression”.

The abstract continues that: “Wanted exposure rates were higher for teens, boys, and youth who used file-sharing programs to download images, talked online to unknown persons about sex, used the Internet at friends’ homes, or scored in the borderline or clinically significant range on the Child Behavior Checklist subscale for rule-breaking. Depression also could be a risk factor for some youth. Youth who used filtering and blocking software had lower odds of wanted exposure”.

The abstract concludes that: “More research concerning the potential impact of Internet pornography on youth is warranted, given the high rate of exposure, the fact that much exposure is unwanted, and the fact that youth with certain vulnerabilities, such as depression, interpersonal victimization, and delinquent tendencies, have more exposure”.

Parents concerned that their children are at risk should use parental control software to explicitly block unwanted content, and can also find very useful information at the Common Sense website, which also has excellent information on how to deal with and understand websites popular with children and teenagers, such as MySpace.