Australian mums and dads are facing a silent but soul-destroying public health crisis as their kids battle with internet pornography.
A committee of the New South Wales Parliament is holding an inquiry into the “Impacts of harmful pornography on mental, emotional, and physical health.” Although appalling anecdotes and grim statistics have surfaced in the mainstream media, they have been quickly forgotten.
They shouldn’t be.
Experts concur that internet pornography is pervasive in Australian schools.
The global porn industry is “the world’s largest department of education,” Melinda Tankard-Reist, a Canberra-based advocate for women and girls, told the committee.
“It has contributed to rising rates of violence against women, harmful sexual behaviours and peer-on-peer sexual abuse at levels never before seen. A generation of boys are being exposed to rape porn, sadism, torture, and incest porn at the click of a button.”
Pervasiveness of porn is not a case of moral panic. It is a gut-wrenching reality backed up by academic research.
A study published last year in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health found that “100 per cent of boys and young men and 82 per cent of girls and young women reported ever viewing pornography.”
The researchers found that 54.4 per cent of young men and 14.3 per cent of young women viewed pornography at least weekly.
And it is affecting not just “young men” but young children as well.
Three members of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools Australia (NSW) told MPs that pornography is affecting the behaviour of primary school children.
Lorrae Sampson, principal of Nowra Anglican College, said: “I’ve seen an increase in the objectification of our young girls, in particular, in a sexual way by some boys. I’m also seeing that girls are becoming less empathetic towards each other and they’re becoming more anxious, particularly when they get up into Years 9 and 10.”
Another principal, Lourdes Mejia, of Montgrove College, in Orchard Hills, said that she had noticed “much younger instances of children, as young as Year 2 or Year 1.”
“You can see that they have had some access to pornography from perhaps the stories that they tell or even sometimes the drawings or things that they write, little notes that they pass to each other.”
In some schools, primary school boys have traumatised their teachers by taunting them with pornographic references.
Tankard Reist told the committee that she knew three young women teachers who quit their jobs.
“They haven’t lasted six months. They’re propositioned, they’re sexually groaned at and moaned at, they’ve had photos taken down their blouses, under their skirts. They’ve been turned into AI deepfake image-based sexual abuse, deepfake sexual abuse, and those images are being shared.”
These disturbing anecdotes are just flotsam and jetsam floating on an immense sea of sleaze.
Dr Deirdre Little, of the Catholic Women’s League, says this about the spread of pornography: “We see the societal effects played out in epidemic intimate partner violence, the rise of ‘sexting’, addictive viewing patterns, escalation of use into increasingly deviant and violent forms, marital infidelity and breakdown, trivialisation of rape, devaluation of monogamy, decreased satisfaction with partner’s appearance, affection, lowered valuation of marriage, decreased desire to have children, viewing extramarital relations as normal and behavioural aggression, which correlates with the strength of the depicted sexual violence.”
So, if pornography is a public health crisis, why aren’t alarm bells ringing?
Because most people are afraid of being stigmatised as wowsers. Because they feel defiled by mentioning it. And because influential voices contend that it’s not a problem. Not just that it is not a crisis, but that pornography is a positive good, so long as it’s not violent.
For example, there is no definition of healthy sexual development, Professor Alan McKee of the University of Sydney wrote in his submission to the committee.
Even discussing it is obnoxiously “heteronormative” he wrote.
“Much research has taken the stance that a number of behaviours—which are not in and of themselves negative—are unhealthy, including anal sex, polyamorous relationships, casual sex and kink,” he wrote. “This is unhelpful.”
Clearly, to dispel uncertainty and confusion, what would be helpful for parents and teachers is a declaration by the NSW Parliament that pornography is a “public health crisis.”
Legislatures in at least 16 American states have passed non-binding declarations to this effect. Virginia’s resolution, for instance, asserts that pornography is perpetuating “a sexually toxic environment.”
The Catholic Weekly spoke to several experts who said that they would have no qualms about supporting this.
“Pornography is absolutely a public health crisis, given its well established (but unfortunately little-known) impacts on both mental health and relationships,” says Dr Nicholas Lawless, a Melbourne clinical psychologist and couple therapist.
“Minors are especially susceptible to some of these harms, but pornography impacts adults too, in the same way as illicit drugs impact both adults and minors despite minors having developing brains that are especially vulnerable to outside influence.”
What explains the silence, then?
Dr Lawless responds that “a lot of people have a vested interest in making pornography seem good or at the very least, harmless in most cases, and that is part of the problem—people not being aware of the real and lasting impacts that pornography can have on their lives and when they do become aware, it not being OK to talk about it due to the mixed messages, feeling like something must be wrong with them because of the effect it has on them, when in reality, that’s normal to be negatively affected by porn.”
Dr Little agrees: “Yes, I think anyone who is concerned about these things, anyone who has reviewed the research and evidence, would consider the intrusion and indeed flood of pornography into our society and homes to be a public health crisis.”
“It’s absolutely a public health crisis,” says Dr Marshall Ballantine-Jones, an Anglican minister who did a PhD in how to reduce the effects of exposure to pornography. He runs a website, Resisting Porn, and Digihelp, an online resource for schools on how to combat the negative effects of pornography and social media.
“The more someone consumes the stuff, the more they think of it, more they talk about it, the more they want to act it out, more risk-taking they become and so this flows out in the schoolyards with hyper-sexualised behaviours,” he told The Catholic Weekly.
Tankard Reist is adamant that Australia is facing a crisis.
“Pornography needs to be recognised as a public health emergency, requiring urgent intervention at every level of at every level of society, schools, parents, school governing bodies, regulatory bodies, and government.”
Will the Minns government rise to the challenge? If not, why not?