And many parents, including myself, make a second mistake about pornography. They don’t really understand what these videos are depicting.
Violent, humiliating, misoginistic videos
“Parents often think that children watch Softcore pornography like Playboy Centerfolds,” says Flud. But pornography today usually shows something else: “Men are cruel to women.”
“Sometimes it is verbal violence, with a hostile and humiliating language. Sometimes it is violent behavior, such as strangling, slaps or suffocation,” Flud says. Many times the videos show women who enjoy this cruelty, however violent or humiliating. “This is not an appropriate form of sexuality education for our 8-year-olds or our 12-year-old children,” he adds.
This The sexist and violent content is “routine”. Flud says. In a A major survey from the UKResearchers have analyzed 50 of the most popular pornographic videos. About 90% of them showed clear violence or aggression extremely focused on women, according to the magazine researchers AbuseS In another study, Researchers have analyzed more than 4,000 scenes from two major pornographic websites. About 40% of them include one or more acts of physical aggression. “Clapping, warmth, shaking, pulling hair and suffocation were the five most common forms of physical aggression,” the researchers said in Archives of sexual behavior.
Scientists begin to understand how early exposure to this content can affect the health and development of children, says the social scientist Brian Willowby at the University of Brigham Young. For example, it may prevent children’s education for the consent and importance of respect in relationships.
“The gender dynamics shown in these videos creates truly unhealthy expectations when it comes to intimacy and relationships,” says Willobi.
Studies have also found that early exposure increases the risk of developing the problematic use of pornography later in life. For young children, the explicit content can be quite disturbing, shocking and rattling. “Their understanding of sex as a whole is very limited,” says Willowby. So it is difficult for them to understand what they see or deal with the emotions and physiological answers that it triggers in their brain and bodies.
For some children, seeing explicit content can even be traumatic, says Megan Maas at Michigan State University. In one of the Maas studies, one described what happened when he blown the word “whistle” in sixth grade. “He eventually saw a genre of pornography called abuse of persons, which shows that women are stuck on penises,” Maas explains. “Women often cry, with the mascara flowing on their faces.”
Videos caused a visceral reaction inside him, which made him want to throw himself. “Then he just turned off sexually,” Maas says, “the whole experience scared him and really changed it.”
What the parents can do
In the last two years 21 countries have accepted laws requiring pornographic sites to check the user’s age. But every scientist interviewed for this story says it is imperative that parents apply protection to your home.
Here are three measures to take.
Block the contents with your router.
One of the most powerful tools for protecting children from pornography is to sit in your home: your router.
“As a parent, your router is the most important and underestimated digital device in your home,” says Chris McKena. He is the founder and CEO of the company Protect young eyes, Which has helped schools and churches in the last decade to create More festive digital spaces.
Your router acts as a door through which the Internet enters your home via WiFi. You can somehow place a bouncing on the door on your WiFi. You can block any website you want to go through this door and reach devices that use WiFi. To do this, you can:
- Directly enter your router through a browser and program it to block explicit websites. Some routers include parental control; Some don’t.
- Buy a device that connects to your router and filters unwanted content such as Cortex at home or AuraS
Or
- Buy a router that was created specifically to block pornographic content, such as GriffinS
McKena and his team have tested these options And he found that the third was the easiest and most effective. But it’s expensive. A new router can cost up to $ 300.
“This router allows you to turn off the Internet entirely at certain times of the day or on certain devices with a telephone application,” he explains. “So I could be in Switzerland and control the whole network in my house.”
Add filters to cellular devices, then watch and observe
The control of your router obviously won’t stop All Explicit content from entering your home. First, it will not stop the content of devices that use cellular or mobile data, such as smartphones and tablets that receive cellular data.
This ubiquitous access to explicit smartphone content is a major reason why many psychologists and pediatricians recommend waits to eighth grade or even later Before you give your child a smartphone.
Another big problem is that the explicit content is not limited to pornographic websites. Repeated investigations show that it often appears on Social media platforms and video games Directly aimed at teenagers and younger children.
And as Brian Willobi of Byu points out, this will not prevent children from seeing pornography in the homes of a friend or relative or even at school on other children’s phones. “The bigger part of young children have access to pornography for the first time through their friends, “he says.
Thus, Willoughby and other scientists recommend using all filters and parent controls available with devices and applications. But, he emphasizes, parents need to know that these controls do not work well. “They are just very easy to circumvent,” he says. “I think too many parents include these filters and leave. It’s just not good enough.”
Willoughby recommends that parents often monitor children’s activities on applications, games and social media. This does not mean that you are with your child every time they use their phone, but it means that they have access to their accounts and often look at their content. “Look who they talk to and what they share,” he says. “This is just as important, if not more than to control your router, I think.”
“Children will make a lot of noise in this monitoring and talk about how,” you are the only parent who does it, “Willowby says. “What I always tell my children is,” I just love you more than these parents. ” “
Teach children what to do when they meet a content disorder
Finally, every child should be aware that it can come across shocking, scary or upset photos and videos on the Internet, says McKena.
So, teach children what to do when they meet this content. “In our organization, we teach children to put and tell someone,” he says. Then give the child a list of the people they can say, including the parent, grandparents or a more adult brother.
Then he recommends practicing this action. “Make your child sit on the kitchen counter with your device and say, “Listen, I want you to pretend to have seen something that makes you uncomfortable. I’m going to go to the bedroom. I want you to close Chromebook, bring it up and tell me aloud,” Mom, I saw something unpleasant. ” “
This restoration gives you a chance to practice another critical skill. “It’s not scared,” McKena says. If you are scared, the child may not want to come to you again in the future, he says.
Instead, assure the child that he or she is not in difficulty, they are safe and that you love them the same, he says. You could say, “There’s nothing you could click or look at, which will ever change the way I feel about you, honey. You’re still my amazing child.“
