What's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem.
Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.
Interesting perspective and maybe generational divide: if you are not a geek with special interest hobbies and reason to visit subreddits, you only know it from nsfw stuff?
Oh that's easy. The problem is with society. No one is in any way damaged or traumatized cause they saw some sex on a screen at approximately 13 years old. Its ridiculous we go through the intrusive charade of trying to stop them. The problem is there is no problem.
Unfortunately the maximum POST size Chrome allows limits my response to 4GB so I won't be able to cover it all.
The problem isn't "13 year olds being traumatized because they see sex on a screen" but "13 year olds developing porn addiction alongside their burgeoning sexuality".
Porn addiction is a very real issue and todays youth is especially susceptible to it. Today a 13 y/o boy can see more breasts in an hour than every one of his prior-digital age male ancestors have seen combined. Its an absolute stimulus overload.
It's literally highly contested if it even exists. The evidence base is extremely poor.
For laymen however, referring to it as an addiction is what most accurately encompasses its impact on those who become compulsive consumers of it.
This assertion seems odd to me.
More importantly: you should not assume that just because you do not suffer from porn addiction that others do not suffer from it.
It's the oldest trick in the book.
Poor little guy!
Certainly can’t let young kids see breasts lest they become raging maniacs. Societal mental health, brought to you by bottled milk.
Porn addiction may or may not be a problem but a puritan society only makes it worse. People freaking out about “what if a young’un sees the genitalia of the other gender” are, without fault, part of extreme puritan societies like the USA.
There is a similar problem around alcohol addiction and without fault, you’ll find that people have a much worse relationship with alcohol when their first introduction to it is a massive party for their 21st. Anecdotally, my first taste of alcohol was red wine at 12 (I’m French and it’s pretty common here). Today I rarely ever drink anything.
The problem in that equation is not the availability of porn, it’s the taboo around sex.
This isn't a case of rampant puritanism, go to Pornhub (one of the milder purveyors) and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depiction of healthy sex between two loving adults.
The message becomes incredibly different. The very fact that you talk about "sexually charged content" while saying that the message would be the same with "breasts" vs "intercourse" is a demonstration of the cultural differences scrollaway mentioned. A lot of places "breasts" does not automatically imply anything sexually charged.
It matters, given that it is far less obvious to me whether or not your "updated" statement is true, depending on which specific age range we're talking about when you say "child" and how large a proportion of that age group needs to have seen any to justify generalising, and what "extreme amounts" are.
Go to [0] and tell me how that is a depiction of a healthy whatever. Also please describe how the paywall on porn sites would help poor 13 y.o. chaps not to see this.
LOL.
So you DO think this is a sexual content.
And the difference between 'other platforms' sexual content is the lack of an exposed genitals.
[0] should be sex depicted only between a loving adults? what about a non-loving adults who does that for fun and health?
[1] really?
May be true on average, but there are not-so-exceptional exceptions to this. For example areas where topless sunbathing is common and cultures where breasts aren't hidden because of puritan ideas. (Also maybe Nordic countries? Not sure how old teens are before mixed naked saunas are a normal thing) If that was a significant problem you'd think we'd see some extreme behaviours there.
Or maybe things changing isn't necessarily a catastrophe 100% of the time?
Eating too much fruit actually could turn you blind...
And there are a whole bunch of foods that affect your sexual hormone levels too.
What if it was 8 year old children? Would you feel differently then?
If anything, I'm a bit worried at what growing up in puritan countries without even visiting places like that and getting nudity normalised does to people.
> Fruit and nudity are not the same. Fruit doesn’t trigger hormonal responses, nudity does.
Nothing about hardcore sex. That your intent with the comment further above that was about sex is irrelevant to what I replied to.
The minute someone has some actual evidence of a problem, I am all ears, whatever the ages involved (at least until people are consenting adults anyway).
But you comment is, respectfully, exactly what I object to: how I feel about a 4, 8, 12, or 16 year old is irrelevant. Maybe I don't like it. But that doesn't make it harmful. So we should either show some harm or calm down a bit. Or at least admit this is nothing to do with health or child safety, it's just our personally feelings about ickyness...
We've literally had the same moral panics about everything since the dawn of civilization. Just 200 years ago it was common knowledge that showing the legs on a piano would drive me wild with lust. 40 years ago reefer madness was a fact. 20 years ago masterbation made you blind. Now it's porn. Isn't it time we grew up? Aren't we more mentally prepared for change than the victorians?
It's been porn for many decades already. As a child combing my parents book cases for interesting stuff at some point in the mid 1980's, one of the things that initially got me excited because of a rather misleading title (and then disappointed, but still fascinated by lots of weird case studies) was a book from the 1970's about research into the psychological impacts on porn.
The internet has just re-ignited a many decades old argument by arguing now that it isn't porn per se, but the sheer amount of porn and ease of access, this time.
Nudity accompanied with a sense of guilt, forbiddeness or assumed hornyness is what triggers different responses.
You can blame 'porn addiction' on nudity as much as you like, completely ignoring the elephant in the room [0]
Or perhaps breasts, vaginas and penises are not like fruit at all? Do most people get sexually aroused from fruit? No. Do most people get sexually aroused when they see the sexual parts of of the sex they’re interested in? Yes.
Fruit is not the same as sex, and I can’t believe this even has to be explained.
We have no idea what this level of stimulation is doing to boys at development.
I think you are confusing the moral aspects with the unknowns here.
There is a shocking drop in the testosterone levels of young men from 1999 to 2016 per studies if you google it. 20-30% drop.
The correlation in data would obviously be there but who knows about causation.
I am 50 and didn't see hardcore porn until I was almost 18. Some kid got into his fathers porn collection and was playing it at a party. I still remember it was the most horny I had ever been at that point in my life. It is illogical to believe that level of stimulation from the onset of puberty has no effect on development.
I don't see what the solution to this is though. It is a really tough subject to study on any real level.
Also, sperm levels have been dropping for far longer than internet porn has been a thing. It stands to reason they might share a cause.
There isn’t a solution. You can’t block teens from viewing porn. The best thing you can do is educate them that (most) porn isn’t a reflection of what most sex is like, and to watch out for porn addiction.
Now I don't think that book should've been locked away in a section of the library inaccessible to children, but that doesn't mean it's absolutely safe for children to consume content intended for adults.
I don't think that's necessarily true. People are influenced by what they see (advertising wouldn't work if they weren't...). It's certainly possible that watching porn makes people want to emulate what they've watched. As consenting adults that's fine, but I don't think we really know what impact that has on younger people, and it would be irresponsible to just say it doesn't have any impact without studying it (just as it is to say the opposite.)
I don't think there's anything really wrong with wanting to protect children and limit what they see and do until they're capable of understanding themselves well enough to deal with what they've seen. But I definitely think it has to be done in a way that actually works. This policy almost certainly won't, so it's a giant waste of time.
It may be hard to stop, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem.
If you’re raising children, do you attempt to place safeguards in your family to prevent the potential outcomes discussed in the papers, or do you dismiss them because the correlations aren’t strong enough?
Never before in human history has the volume and type of pornography been so universally available. We’re in brand new territory here, and I think it’s worth paying attention to even self-reported anecdotes as the science is still being settled.
If I trusted self-reported anecdotes I'd also seek to protect my family against ghosts, extra-terrestrial probing sessions and vengeful gods, among a long range of other risks I don't take seriously. If you can't provide evidence that gives a stronger indication of a damaging effect than that, I'll treat it the same way I threat those risks. If anything, if those studies are the best you can find it reassures me that the risks are near non-existent.
https://timesofindia.com/city/raipur/chhattisgarh-8-year-old...
I guess sex education and teaching about consent at an early age is the only thing that can be done.
If there has been adequate adult supervision, the eight year old girl would not have been repeatedly raped for two months.
The proposed legislation is insane, but it also requires all of those sites to implement age verification.
It's adults that'll need to learn. I foresee a lot of awkward conversations with parents trying to ask theirs kids how to set up VPNs while pretending it's for a different purpose.