One in four people have seen online porn by the age of twelve, a BBC Three-commissioned survey has revealed.
The BBC reported that 62 per cent of respondents, who were all aged 16 to 21, said they first saw it “when they weren’t expecting to or because they were shown it by someone else”.
Of the 1,002 questioned seven per cent were under ten when they first saw online porn.
Porn: What’s The Harm?
BBC Three commissioned the survey for its documentary ‘Porn: What’s The Harm?’.
Nearly three quarters of the respondents believe that online pornography affects men’s expectations.
Asked to explain their answers most said that men expect women to behave like women in porn films.
Scary
The BBC documentary’s presenter, Jameela Jamil, said: “I worry about the new generation of men whose first real introduction to sex is what they see on their laptop”.
She added: “They think we are supposed to look, sound and move like that. What’s scarier is that I worry young women are starting to think the same.”
Academics Dr Miranda Horvath and Dr Madeline Coy, who analysed the survey, reported a clear difference between how boys and girls view porn.
Unrealistic
Of the women questioned, one in five said they have never seen online porn while four per cent of men said the same.
When asked what is bad about porn, 17 per cent said it is unrealistic while 12 per cent believed it objectifies women.
Over half of those surveyed thought that online pornography affects what young men and women expect from sex.
Distorted
In December, the headmaster at one of Britain’s leading co-educational schools said online porn “gives a distorted image of human relationships to young people”.
In an interview with The Times, Uppingham school’s head teacher, Richard Harman, described online pornography as an additional pressure that teenagers face today.
“From an early age kids are bombarded with images of what it looks like to be apparently perfect”, he said.
“If you add all those up, this is a different kind of pressure than really can ever have been the case in the past and [it] doesn’t really have any borders”, he explained.