The Government wants a mandatory internet filter to reduce the risk of children seeing really bad stuff online. So how often do kids really stumble across online porn? Here’s a quick-fire snap-shot from around the world.

Europe

A massive 3 year research project for the EU by Sonia Livingstone and Leslie Haddon (from the London School of Economics), EU Kids Online, says exposure to porn ranks second amongst ‘online risks’, behind plain old giving out of personal information, and before seeing something ‘violent or hateful’. Meeting an online contact in the offline world – which is probably the greatest fear in the community – is the least common risk (though admittedly one of the most dangerous). Across Europe, 4 in 10 teenagers have been exposed to online porn, although there ‘is considerable disagreement’ about it’s harmful impact on children. Far fewer teens report this exposure as distressing in any way.

America

(This info is drawn from the US Internet Safety Technical Task Force, and their 2008 report Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies.)

Roughly the same as the EU, 42 per cent of American teens have either sought out or accidentally seen porn, or done both of these; of these, two thirds had only stumbled upon it inadvertently. Nearly 1 in 10 were ‘very or extremely upset’. Older teens are more likely to seek out porn than younger teens. In fact, despite fears in the community, younger kids are more likely to see mags and movies before they see online porn; the Internet comes in third. It’s a sexy world offline, and online it seems. Of the teens that do see stuff online they don’t want to see, they don’t go back to it. So once seen, they tend to steer well clear of damaging material.

One of the great ideas behind the filter is protecting children, presumably from adults. But there’s evidence to say that when it comes to unwanted sexual solicitations, it’s not adults to be feared, it’s other kids. Most sexual solicitors are other adolescents (up to 48 per cent), or young adults (in the 20s%), with only 4%–9% coming from adults. The vast majority are dealt with by kids well, according to other research. Youth typically ignore or deflect solicitations; 92% of the responses amongst Los Angeles–based youth to these incidents were deemed “appropriate”. Chat rooms and instant messaging are still the dominant place where solicitations occur (77%). (NB. these solicitations wouldn’t be covered by a Net Filter – it’s just interesting to gauge what young people think are threats online).

The researchers included two questions with two ideas of how young people use the net. One: surfing. The other: emails and private communication. The numbers in the American report are for both. A note here: no private email or IM communication would be included in any Government attempt to filter the net. It also wouldn’t be considered classifiable by the Classification Board (personal communications are exempt).

Australia

In Michael Flood’s 2007 report on 16 and 17 year olds (Exposure to pornography among youth in Australia, Journal of Sociology, 43;45) he found that 84 per cent boys and 60 per cent of girls say they have been exposed accidentally to sex sites on the Internet. Flood does recognise that the younger you are, the less likely you are to inadvertently stumble across porno online, by drawing comparisons with the UK and the US.  He cites an Australian study among Internet-connected households with children aged 8 to 13 years, where 19 percent of children said that they had accidentally found websites their parents would prefer them not to see ‘a few times’. Almost half of the sites contained nudity or pornography.

It’s disingenuous to say a filter that blocks RC content at ISP level is to protect children. The vast amount of porn (described in most research as simply nudity or sex) would remain unblocked and freely available for kids to keep on stumbling across. The especially ‘harmful’ category of RC would be blocked for everyone; the rhetoric of child-protection is watered down when you look at the stats, and the case for more education, and a whole-population approach to empowering users comes into startling clarity.

I was actively seeking out porn at the age of 15 and 16, none of which would be blocked under the proposed scheme. Kids do it all the time, cos they’re horny; so I’m now looking into research about what teens themselves report as harmful, or not, to get away from adult perceptions of what porn means to kids.