27-year-old secondary school teacher Layla — who only wants to use her first name for privacy reasons — wishes she could tell her students more about pornography. Layla teaches PSHE (personal, social, and health education) and says porn is one of many serious subjects her school won’t talk about, but she believes the students are “obsessed with it” and “need to learn safety practices desperately.”
“I overhear kids as young as 11 talk about porn in my classes,” she tells Mashable. “The 13/14 year olds are showing porn to each other at school. Kids watch leaked celebrity sex tapes on lunch breaks and laugh at them,” Layla explains.
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She brought up porn lessons to her headmaster, suggesting an assembly on porn safety, but there was a “huge fear” surrounding it. “A lot of teachers don’t want to believe that young kids are watching porn, and they also think that if they’re not watching porn and we talk to them about it, they’ll find it because of us,” Layla explains.
Why children need to learn about porn
Whether we like it or not, children need to learn about porn. Half of children are estimated to have seen pornography by the age of 13. For experts, such as Lucy Emmerson from The Sex Education Forum, this is worrying. Mainstream pornography often features violent and misogynistic depictions of sex, which could influence a young person who doesn’t know that porn is staged for entertainment only.
So, there’s an “urgent need to ensure that there’s an alternative script for today’s young people” so they know what to expect and aspire to from sex.
That should be coming from teachers, as part of sex education. Since 2021 it has been mandatory for all secondary schools in England to teach about the harms of pornography. Yet, in a poll from the same year, 58 percent of young people reported learning nothing at all or not enough about pornography.
Emmerson adds that while young people need to learn about porn at school, they need a solid foundation of sex and relationships education first as this builds up their knowledge about bodies, healthy relationships and online safety, and develops skills around things like peer pressure and communication. This makes it easier to teach about pornography, but a lot of schools in the UK are missing the basics.
Sophia Smith Galer found that government-provided teacher training modules covering issues such as consent and internet safety (including pornography use) have only been downloaded a few thousand times.
” A 2019 survey found 28 percent of teachers believed their school was not ready to deliver sex education, and 47 percent lacked confidence in their own ability to teach it. ”
Some teachers are also uncomfortable talking about porn (or sex at all) with kids. A 2019 survey found 28 percent of teachers believed their school was not ready to deliver sex education, and 47 percent lacked confidence in their own ability to teach it.
Three in ten sex education classes are also facilitated by teachers who don’t have any sex education related training. While some may argue this is better than nothing, poor sex education in school delivered by inappropriate facilitators can lead to negative sexual experiences in adulthood including learning about sex via trial and error which can lead to unwanted sexual experiences, reinforcing shame around sex and even sexual dysfunction.
Research also suggests pornography consumption without education on what pornography actually is, what it should be used for, and its potential harms, can lead to increased misogyny.
So, why are teachers resistant to talking about porn?
Emmerson notes that many adults received little or inadequate sex education themselves, and so there’s a “society-wide lack of experience of comfortable and appropriate conversations about porn and sex in general between two generations.”
This generational gap is exaggerated when it comes to porn because the nature of porn has changed rapidly in recent years both in terms of content. “There’s the ubiquity of aggression and violence, and the context of accessing porn via smart phones,” she says.
