Singer Billie Eilish was exposed to sexually explicit acts online at age 11. Her experience is more common than many Americans realize.
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In December, French authorities promised to block five major porn sites if they didn’t take immediate action to ensure that viewers are 18 and older. This news came shortly after Billie Eilish’s denunciation of pornography, which shocked many of the 20-year-old singer’s fans.
Aside from the novelty of a celebrity acknowledging the pitfalls of pornography consumption, people were horrified to hear that Eilish was exposed to sexually explicit acts online when she was only 11 years old.
Yet her experience is far more common than many Americans seem to realize. According to a study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, 93% of boys and 62% of girls are exposed to pornography before age 18.
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What about younger children? It will be years until we know how many children are being exposed to pornography, according to Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Studies on this age group are unethical, she told me, which restricts the availability of data for researchers.
“They’re asking people who are like 18 about their experiences when they were 6,” Hawkins said. “But those who are 18 and in their early 20s right now, they didn’t have smartphones when they were 6, like our 6-year-olds do now. So, it will be a couple more years until we’re able to really understand the scope of how many of our younger children are being exposed. But we do know it’s a lot.”
Anecdotally, we know that children are introduced to mature content at startlingly young ages. Robin Reber is a director of Star Guides Wilderness, a camp specializing in treating youth struggling with addictions. She told me that she has talked with countless parents who have called her weeping, distraught to discover that their children are struggling with pornography. She received a surge in phone calls from parents seeking help for children as young as 7 during the pandemic.
The effects of porn
These experiences are not anomalies, and they’re destroying kids.
Young children who view pornography frequently disengage from their family and start to isolate more, Hawkins said, noting that these children often become withdrawn, sullen or depressed.
Pro-pornography advocates argue that porn is not inherently harmful, that it can be used as sex education, and they suggest there are other benefits to watching porn.
Studies by organizations such as Fight the New Drug, however, show that porn is extremely addictive, that it can damage relationships and intimacy, and that it can increase the likelihood of infidelity. One study found that 56% of divorce cases involved a spouse who had an “obsessive interest” in pornography.
According to research from Fight the New Drug, porn desensitizes viewers, requiring them to watch more novel content to experience the same reaction. For example, 46.9% of respondents in a 2016 study reported that over time they began watching pornography that had previously been uninteresting or even disgusting to them.
Porn has also been found to cause developmental problems, body image issues as well as erectile dysfunction. If these are consequences of adults’ pornography consumption, the consequences of viewing pornography are likely worse for children whose understanding of relationships and sex is still being shaped.
For example, studies suggest that porn normalizes sexual objectification and distorts healthy views of sex because of violent and aggressive content. The warped scripts in pornography are extremely harmful for young viewers, Hawkins said, because it teaches them to expect and desire aggression during sex.
“It is changing their sexual templates,” she said. “It’s impacting who they’re talking to, how they’re attracted, what kinds of acts they want to engage in.”
Billie Eilish said as much in her recent comments: “The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it’s because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”
Despite these sobering trends, porn use has grown increasingly acceptable in our culture, and the convergence of online access, social media and smartphones have contributed to its alarming ease of accessibility.
Parents have told Reber that their children were first exposed to pornography by predators on social media sites, and others first viewed porn at a friend’s house. Many boys are introduced to porn through friends they meet in online gaming.
Some children are exposed at school. The Washington Post reported that a 9-year-old boy in Maryland was able to access hundreds of pornographic sites on his school-issued laptop, and an 11-year-old boy used the search engine Ecosia to view sites with pornographic images. Both incidents occurred despite school administrators’ claims that they use filters to block objectionable content on devices issued to students below ninth grade.
Handing smartphones to young children is part of the problem, Reber said, because many parents have no idea what their kids are doing online. One study found that 53% of American children own a smartphone by age 11.
“Know what your children are looking at,” Reber said. “Be careful if you’re going to give a device to your child because you’re handing them access to the world and to people that you don’t know. And would you do that normally? Would you open your door and let anybody come in? Because that’s what you’re doing.”
Know what your kids are doing online
Both Reber and Hawkins emphasized that we shouldn’t blame parents for their children’s exposure to pornography. They’re right – there’s no way to completely protect children from the onslaught of material waiting to expose them to behaviors and ideas that could inflict lasting damage.
As a nation, however, we need to do more to protect kids from sexually explicit and sexually violent content. Emulating France’s recent move would be a step in the right direction.
But parents are the first line of defense for their children against explicit content that could traumatize them, damage their psychological well-being and misshape the way they view themselves, one another and sex.
Deciding at what age a child is ready for access to internet-connected devices (including smartphones), what content filters to use and ways to monitor internet use are critical issues that should be addressed for the safety of your children.
Otherwise, parents, and others entrusted with the care of a child, are left to hope that their kids will be the exception to the rule.
Without due vigilance, they won’t be.
Theresa Olohan is an Opinion fellow on the USA TODAY Editorial Board and a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame. Follow her on Twitter: @theresa_olohan
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