Children need to be educated about porn from as early as ten years of age. That’s according to Caroline West, who is doing a doctorate in Sexuality Studies and Pornography at Dublin City University
Speaking on RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime on Thursday she rejected the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar’s, suggestion that the State would look into banning access to online commercial porn for anyone under 18 as is proposed in Britain.
Ms West cited an Irish study which says that the average age of first exposure to porn on the internet was about 13, and so, she said, “the idea is then we can start having education in this area maybe around 10, 11 — that’s obviously very age-appropriate as well, just to prepare them for it.”
She claimed: ”Everywhere in the world that has decent, modern, inclusive sex education that’s calm, that talks about STIs, that talks about pregnancy, that talks about pleasure, all those sorts of things — all the rates for STI transmissions, for losing your virginity, for teenage pregnancy — they’re all extremely low in those places.”
“The places where there’s no sex education, the rates of pregnancy and losing your virginity are much, much higher. So the children in the Netherlands, they have really good sex education and they watch porn later and in Croatia, they’ve done a study that lasted almost two years and so the children who watched porn quite young, by the end of that two years, they were like ‘well this isn’t realistic, I don’t want to watch this. This isn’t really sex. I’m not interested,’ so the taboo and the excitement level was really taken out of it as they had decent sex education.”
