Confronting porn: ‘What’s going on with our children? You gave them the phones’
Siobhán O’Higgins, sexologist at University of Galway, pictured at her home in the city. Picture: Ray Ryan
The average age for a child to receive a mobile phone is about nine years old.
From the moment the device is powered up, the internet is just a few taps away. Cat videos, memes, Minecraft tutorials, influencers, politics, forums, and of course: porn.
“Parents are saying, ‘What’s going on with our children?’” said University of Galway sexologist Siobhán O’Higgins.
“You gave them the phones.”
Never in our history have we given so much access to children at such a formative time in their lives. Not only do children have access to the world’s most entertaining tools, networks, and distractions, but one way or another they’ll be able to find porn — if it doesn’t find them first.
In a recent survey of almost 2,000 University of Galway students, a quarter of men watched porn every day and half watched several times a week. Women watched around four times less, just 1.6% of female students watched daily and 12% a few times a week.
The survey shows that most boys were exposed to porn in their early teens, while girls were generally exposed in their mid-to-late teens. But times have changed and, in just half a generation, children are getting phones younger and younger.
Mounting evidence suggests porn consumption can cause serious and long-lasting harm, especially when engaged with from a young age.
Of particular concern to health experts are the findings of another University of Galway study, which found most young people are using porn for sex education.
Experts speaking to the have suggested as the State syllabus on sex education is vastly ineffective and not fit for purpose, young people are sexually maturing with a skewed image of sex and intimacy — and it’s all within reach in their pockets.
Children are exposed to “sexual media” every day that holds “very sexualised and heteronormative ideas on how to enact any form of intimacy”, said Ms O’Higgins.
Sexual media includes porn, but it can also be seen on popular social network sites such as TikTok and Instagram. However, internet algorithms drag users in and prey on sexual urges to get people to watch porn — and teenagers aren’t immune.
“There’s very little discussion of consent [in porn], and young people watch it every day”, said Ms O’Higgins. "It impinges on their world, from song lyrics, adverts, and all the way to porn.
“[Children] know that [porn] is not real, but yet it's impacting on how they think they should behave and look. The size of their penises, whether they should have pubic hair or not — it makes teenagers feel very insecure in themselves.”
“What we want our young people to do is to actually develop an emotionally and physically healthy adult sexuality. And how do we support our young people to do that?
"It’s not through giving them phones and letting them run riot in terms of pornography without any understanding of what they’re seeing, and the gendered sexual scripts.”
“They think they have to try everything,” she said. “If you look at the rise in people being choked [during sex], that is a kink in itself, but when I talk to young people in schools, they say: ‘Oh yeah, there’s lots of choking [in sex]’. I mean, what’s that about?!”
Porn focuses on the individual taking from another for sexual pleasure, whereas giving an orgasm to a cared partner is one of the best feelings you can have, she explained. And placing the blame on toxic masculinity “absolves society of not actually educating our young men properly".
Society is not countering the male gaze young boys are exposed to with an understanding that it’s OK to be vulnerable, she added.
“For years, our [sex education system] has not taught anything about desire and pleasure,” she said.
"If we taught our children about their bodies, masturbation, all these things from an early age, there’d be less of this shame and more of an understanding, like: ‘OK, I’ve watched that, and there’s six people who are all choking each other and doing all these things, and I’m getting really turned on. But that doesn’t mean that’s what I want to do.’
"They’re seeing very worrying things from the age of nine and they don’t know what to do with it. Boys tend to laugh, they use humour, because they can’t admit that it scares the shit out of them.”
One group touring the country to educate young people is the University of Galway’s Active Consent team. Drama lecturer Charlotte McIvor teamed up with researchers in the university’s School of Psychology to help communicate its findings around consent and sexuality to young people left behind by a sex education system that has not been updated since the 1990s.
“We see from the data that people feel their sex education left out important information, or that it was all functional and just educated around biology or birth control,” said Ms McIvor.
First staged in 2014, the play now known as has been touring college campuses nationwide with college-age actors.
It deals with hooking up on dating apps, non-consensual sending and sharing of intimate images, coming out as non-heterosexual at school, understanding your own sexuality, catcalling, sexual assault in clubs, abuse on dating apps, and, ultimately, what healthy consent and relationships look like.
Porn use has a deep knock-on effect on behaviours, one of which is consent, which is at the heart of the play.
The minimalist play tells real-life anonymised stories gained from survey data and audience feedback to reflect the experiences of Gen Z, making the play an evolving show that changes with its audience. The play has continued to “mature and respond” to a changing understanding of consent in Irish society, she said.
“Young people are very aware of the invisible expectations [around sex],” she said. “At the heart of all of this is communication between partners, regardless of their genders or sexual orientations.
In between scenes in the play, the four actors present research by the Active Consent team, such as: only 23% of college students agree or strongly agree that sex education was sufficient in school; or, 23% of male and 14% of female teenagers felt they had the knowledge for consent.
The most recent iteration of the play was developed over the summer of 2021 to include the latest data.
“Often we just learn about the mechanics of sex,” said cast member Ikenna Anyabuike. “But life is not mechanical, it’s a lot more messy and flawed.
“I would argue that the consent, the relationship with your body, the root of pleasure, all these things are far more important than the mechanics… I think the good bit about this play is it places you in scenarios that aren’t mechanical … School gives you the mechanics, but this gives you something much more important, which is the things behind that: the consensual language, the consent literacy.”
Gavin Friel, who is a researcher and actor in the play, said research shows a low level of satisfaction with sex education classes at school. He said teachers aren’t trained to tackle the nuanced questions that children have around consent and sexuality.
“There’s some schools where it’s just not touched — it’s just put to the corner as much as possible,” he said.
“When people leave school, they have an expectation of being sexually active, and then you don’t have the tools and consent language to safely engage with sex. It’s a learning process through the act itself, and that raises the risk of sexual violence.
“Because everyone’s dancing around the conversations around sex, porn is the only thing that teenagers consider closest to reality. They’ll try and understand it, take it as a study guide. They’ll think: ‘Do I have to perform like this? What if I don’t last this long? What if I don’t look like this?’.
“[In porn] there’s no presentation of consent, there’s no consent behaviour in porn. But they did that off-screen and [people] shouldn’t mimic what [they] see in porn.”
Cast member MJ Devlin Larsen said: “I went to an all-girls school. I think a lot of us would have been astounded to know that not every female body is going to look like a porn star’s body.
"It’s such a thing for teenagers going through puberty thing, ‘Oh my God, my body doesn’t look like that’. That can be so detrimental to people’s confidence, to think that they’re this freak in the middle of all these perfects, because you don’t have that conversation with your friends when you’re a teenager.”
Active Consent project manager Kate Tierney said: “The key message behind it all is to have active, ongoing, and mutual communication with your partner, which is often left out in porn.”
Every time they perform, the first question is frequently ‘When are you bringing this to younger audiences?’. They recently piloted an age-appropriate version of a play in some secondary schools, and hope to get funding for a wider rollout later this year.
Caitriona Freir, education and training manager at Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) has been training teachers and parents on how to speak to teenagers about internet and porn use through a programme called Let’s Get Real.
She said young people are largely unaware of the negative impacts of porn use, and the eight-week programme aims to help teenagers become critical internet consumers.
“What we hear from educators is that young people end up with problematic messages about gender, power, pleasure, body image, and sexual behaviour because of what porn is telling them,” she said.
"Most porn shows the man being dominant and the woman being submissive.
"The aim of the programme is to make them critical consumers," she adds. "They’re much more conscious that this behaviour could damage them.”
The programme teaches teenagers that the brain is not developed until 25 and are unable to distinguish between porn and reality. It even teaches neuroscience, which students have said was really impactful.
“By having those conversations really early at an appropriate level, it means that they’re much more able to distinguish between what’s real and what’s appropriate behaviour.”
She said the change in curriculum in schools is sorely needed so every school can deliver quality sex education, “not just the ones that are progressive”.
Ann Harte, who trains young people in media literacy in schools around Cork for Cybersafekids, said she is commonly invited into schools on foot of issues around the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.
She talks to students in secondary schools about sexting and pornography, and about its risks. Ms Harte said:
Ms Harte said teachers are “firefighting” this in schools and it “eats into valuable teaching time”, as the “fallout” is often in the classroom.
“Our advice is to have conversations on these topics sooner rather than later in age-appropriate terms, but to have them regularly as well and keep them informal, so the kids aren’t embarrassed,” she said.
She suggests parents should sow the seeds of responsible internet use by having conversations in primary school, saying: “You should never put anything out there that you wouldn’t want the world to see”.
Siobhán O’Higgins said: “It’s very difficult being a parent now. The context in which young people are exploring their sexuality is not the same as when we were growing up.”
She stressed that parents, who also didn’t get good sex education, should be educated to deal with the issues their children are having.
Ms O’Higgins is working with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment on a “far more engaging and relevant” new sex education curriculum for primary, junior cycle, and senior cycle, and added the response from parents has been “very positive”. The new junior cycle curriculum will launch in September, and work is ongoing for primary and senior cycle.
But as students grow up and move on from the education system, countless young people in recent years have slipped through the cracks.
As sex education modernises and sheds its Catholic skin, generations of young people have matured without the education they needed. The question left to ask is — amid a healthcare system devoid of widespread porn addiction supports, who will help them?
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