Document Type
Report
Publication Title
Submission to the NSW Standing Committee on Social Issues inquiry “Impacts of harmful pornography on mental, emotional, and physical health”
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
School
School of Arts and Humanities
Funders
Australian Research Council Discovery Grant Project
Grant Number
DP190102435
Abstract
Our submission is formed from a combined experience of decades of working with teens and more recently, the Australian Research Council funded project (DP190102435), Perceptions of harm from adolescents accessing online sexual content, which explored Australian teens and young people’s (aged 11-17) perspectives of Sexually Explicit Material (SEM) including pornography. Qualitative data was collected between 2021 to 2023, and involved 30 teen interviews, with another 19 interviews with teens occurring a year later (49 interviews in total), and four focus groups (n-18) to explore these issues further. 26 parents of these teens from 24 families were also interviewed, followed by 2 focus groups with parents (n=13). Teens (and their parents) were asked about their perceptions of pornography, whether they find it harmful and were also asked to place pornography within a wider context of harms, to see where pornography sat within household concerns. Teens were also asked about their Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). A number of participant quotes have been used to illustrate points, where their names have been anonymised to protect their identities. Teens under 13 are listed as (preteen) to protect their identities even further. For the most part, we found that teens believed that adults overstate the harms of pornography, and teens take issue with the word ‘harm’ used in relation to pornography (See & Woodley, 2024). While most teens held concerns around the impacts of pornography, most believed that these harms could be mitigated with a renewed focus on RSE, including discussing healthy representations of sex and love, as well as pornography education, such as pornography literacy.
DOI
10.25958/narx-w065