New Delhi: Is your kid an Internet user? If yes, it’s time to be vigilant before he or she gets hooked to porn content on the Net.
An increasing number of children are being exposed to porn at a fairly young age thanks to their exposure to the Internet.
According to a US study, over 40 per cent of children and teenagers who surf the Internet are being exposed to online pornography.
According to the study, most children and teenagers, however, claimed that they were not looking for it and they were viewing sexually explicit websites mostly by accident while surfing the Internet.
According to the research conducted by a team of researchers at the Crimes against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire, as many as 42 per cent of Internet users aged 10 to 17 surveyed said they had seen online pornography in a recent 12-month span.
Of those, as high as 66 per cent said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out, the researchers said.
“It’s beyond the wild West out there. You’ve really taken away the age of innocence,” said Dr Michael Wasserman, a pediatrician who was not involved in the study.
The survey was conducted between March and June 2005, in which 1,500 Internet users aged 10 to 17 were contacted on telephone with their parents’ consent.
Most kids who reported unwanted exposure were aged 13 to 17. Still, sizable numbers of 10- and 11-year-olds also had unwanted exposure — 17 per cent of boys and 16 percent of girls that age.
More than one-third of 16- and 17-year-old boys surveyed said they had intentionally visited X-rated sites in the past year. Among girls the same age, 8 percent had done so. The findings of 2005 were up from 25 per cent in a similar survey conducted in 1999 and 2000.
Unwanted exposure rates were higher for teens, youth who reported being harassed or sexually solicited online or interpersonally victimized offline, and those who were suffering from depression, the study featured in the latest issue of ‘Pediatrics’ says.
“Wanted exposure rates were higher for teens, boys, and youth who used file-sharing programs to download images, talked online to unknown persons about sex, used the Internet at friends’ homes,” it notes.
Youth who used filtering and blocking software had lower odds of wanted exposure. “More research concerning the potential impact of Internet pornography on youth is warranted, given the high rate of exposure, the fact that much exposure is unwanted, and the fact that youth with certain vulnerabilities… have more exposure.”
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