A leading voice in sex education has said porn can be ‘positive’.

Dr. Kate Dawson, a lecturer the University of Greenwich, made the claim on RTE’s Upfront programme on Monday night as part of a discussion about school-based Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). A new RSE programme for junior certificate students is almost complete and ‘porn literacy’ will likely be part of it. A big question is whether students will be taught that porn can be ‘positive’ as well as negative.

Asked whether porn use can ever be positive, Dr Dawson claimed that in the course of her own research, many people reported that “it helped them to feel that their body was normal and that their sexual interests were normal. They felt less alone and isolated”.
On the other hand, she said in the research literature, it is very hard to look into the topic of pornography because you can’t examine it in its natural state.

“You can‘t observe people watching pornography, and see the outcomes over time but we know that for the most part, only a small percentage of people report having very bad experiences with pornography. For the vast majority of people it seems to do no harm”.

This was despite several young women in the audience saying it was influencing men to copy what they see in porn, including slapping and choking women when having sex.

Dr Dawson claimed that academic research has not established a cause and effect relationship between porn and violence. She was contradicted by Peadar Tobin, TD, who said lots of research exists that shows it has this effect.