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While teens are exploring their sexualities in E4's new drama Skins, boys are getting hooked on porn in BBC3's Coming Of Age documentary series. Our sexualised culture is bombarding children with messages about gender roles and sex. The Sex Education Forum has found that half of children using the internet are exposed to porn and that almost a third of children receive unwanted sexual comments via email, chat, instant message or text, suggesting a worrying lack of information about positive relationships. Is porn stepping in to fill the gaps in sex education?
"I caught one kid, aged 12, looking at porn in one of my lessons," says Andrea O'Neale, a secondary school teacher in Sheffield. "It wasn't hardcore or anything - it was a woman lifting her top up and down, with naked boobs, on repetition. His parents were brought in to pick up the phone and he got after-school detention.
"I mean, kids get all kinds of stuff on their mobiles; a lot of boys are bluetoothing porn. I think they are quite widely exposed to it; they're not easily shockable. Do I mean just boys? Yes. Girls don't go anywhere near it."
Boys and girls see sexualised images of females at every turn. Issues such as body image, eating disorders, self-harm, depression, teen pregnancy and pressure to have sex trouble many girls, and the signs are that both sexes are struggling to make sense of what it means to be female.
Last week, a 16-year-old boy admitted making indecent images of a child after using his mobile to film his friend having sex with a 14-year-old girl and sending it to five of her classmates. In May last year, two 16-year-old schoolboys were arrested for making a porn video of a 14-year-old girl on a mobile phone and circulating it around their school in Perth, Scotland. In August, it was reported that the headteacher of Helston school in Cornwall had asked bebo.com, a website popular with teenagers, to remove the school's entry after complaints that children as young as 13 had put soft porn pictures of themselves on it. The pupils had set up the school entry.
Children who have grown up with the internet, email and mobiles are exposed to porn at a much earlier age. Both girls and boys are under immense pressure to pass it off as harmless fun. And if you don't like it, you don't like sex. Or you're gay.
"Both my daughters were subjected to porn as soon as they went to secondary school, aged 11," says Helen Browne, a mother to two teenage girls. "They had to toughen up to it pretty quickly so as not to seem prudish."
It seems that children are not learning enough about positive body image, respectful relationships and how gender roles are stereotyped. Among the criticisms levelled at sex education comes a new claim: that young people need a sex and relationships education (SRE) that counters the damaging messages of porn.
Mainstream youth culture
Lee Eggleston works at South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre (Sericc), a sexual violence support service that has worked in schools. He agrees that porn is now part of mainstream youth culture. "We talk to girls and boys who feel very uncomfortable talking about it or challenging it, as it has become an 'acceptable' way of receiving sex information," he says. "School intranets are not always monitored or checked. Often parents buy their children a mobile unaware that Wap opens the gateway to porn sites. You only have to look at advertising in popular TV guides and magazines to see the vast amount of images of women and girls for mobile screensavers. The Playboy logo is stamped on school folders for children."
Are teachers aware of pupils' levels of exposure to porn? "It is a concern for teachers," admits Christine Tooley, a head of sixth form in Oxfordshire. "Very young students - year 7s - have access to porn, sometimes unwillingly, and we are very concerned that female body images are debased as being something just sexual. Clearly, this affects both genders."
Many teachers say that porn is not a problem within school because of firewall systems on school intranets. "Internet access is tightly controlled, and any porn would have to be brought in from the outside," says Colleen McAllister, a curriculum leader for media studies in a comprehensive school in Newcastle. "However, my students assure me that it is around, and it is mainly boys using it. This is linked to the bluetooth mobile, which means that it can be easily passed between students."
O'Neale recalls an incident in her school: "A teacher friend of mine had the computer projector on and when she went to talk to one of the class, a kid went up and got some filth up so the whole class could see."
New technology isn't the only culprit. "A lot of them, say 13 and upwards, have Nuts, Loaded and FHM," says O'Neale. "Not in lessons. I see them in the dining room, and once in registration."
Kate, a 15-year-old who goes to school in Shropshire, says: "Practically all lads look at Zoo or Nuts and that lot. The ones who are 14 and 15, I mean. I'm not sure whether boys younger than 14 read them - they probably do. It's a very normal thing and no one thinks anything of it." Kate says she hasn't come across porn by accident "apart from on lads' phones. And too many of them have Jordan as their background."
Pressure group Object is campaigning to have lads' mags regulated in the same way as recognised porn. FHM has a "puppies cam" feature that encourages readers to take pictures of unsuspecting women's breasts. Object asks why magazines read by teenage boys aren't subject to the same regulations as those for teenage girls.
The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel (TMAP) was set up by the Home Office in 1996 to regulate these publications and ensure that the subject of sex is approached responsibly.
But, says a spokesperson for Object, "there is a double standard applied to teen boys' and teen girls' sexual education. The display of lads' mags undermines TMAP's work in sexually educating and empowering young women, by reducing them to sexual objects in the eyes of boys and men. The message in lads' mags is that it is boys who hold the power in sexual relations."
Of course, positive work is being done in many schools. "In PSHE [personal, health and social education] and citizenship, the issue of consent is dealt with in relation to the law," says McAllister.
"Gender roles are discussed in relation to the expectations of each gender, linked to relationships and sexual behaviour. There is also a lesson about language and sex, where students are asked to write down slang words and colloquialisms for sexual parts of the body, and the concepts of male and female. Discussion then focuses on why there is a difference in power and authority between the male and female genitalia, and so on."
But with explicit material so easily available, do teachers feel the good work they do is being undermined? "The main problems arise," says Tooley, "when porn is imported from the outside in the form of stuff from the internet, accessed at home, or magazines. Although these issues are dealt with severely by the school, we often see a lack of support from parents, who don't see what the big deal is."
Paul Latham, a teacher at a secondary school in Derby, also finds parental indifference a problem. "The rise of lads' mags like Loaded and FHM is something I've noticed," he says. "We confiscate them, but it seems to me that parents don't see the harm in them. They don't have the same stigma attached to them as porn."
Last year, an NSPCC survey found that incomplete sex education in schools is leaving children confused about what is illegal or unacceptable, with 93% saying that their sex education lessons did not include any information about sexual abuse. The charity has called on the government to ensure 14- to 16-year-olds are taught about sex in the context of relationships, peer pressure and the law.
Socially accepted
Those working in gender violence prevention would like to see this kind of sex education begin much sooner. Damian Carnell is a development worker at TRI (Training, Resources and Information), at the Nottinghamshire Domestic Violence Forum. "We're at a very dangerous point, with porn in all its guises being more socially accepted, sneaking into all kinds of consumer products and on to TV," he says.
"We'd like to see domestic violence awareness and positive relationship promotion, including gender respect and awareness projects, in all school year groups from year 5."
The charity Womankind Worldwide is piloting an education programme - Challenging Violence, Changing Lives - in schools across the UK, to raise awareness about male violence against women. It has a component on pornography and prostitution in year 11. Lis Martin, the creative director, says: "What teachers are saying is that younger girls are vulnerable to approaches from older, sophisticated men from outside school. Porn is used in chatroom grooming. Yet girls are also visiting porn sites to find out what they need to do to please boys. They aren't questioning abusive relationships."
"The only way porn is addressed in SRE," says McAllister, "is a general discussion about how unrealistic the images can be, and that porn is about fantasy. However, it is still worrying only about what expectations boys have about relationships from being exposed to these images.
"In media studies, we do not discuss porn directly, but we do encourage discussions about degrading images of women in some magazines and newspapers, in the hope of dealing with misconceptions. One male student, who was producing a magazine front page for his coursework, thought it perfectly acceptable to expect a female student to 'pose' for him, like the women on front of men's magazines, because this text was 'part of the media'."
"As yet, porn is not de facto on the curriculum. There is a real time lag," says Tooley. "It should be addressed in school, but alongside parents, [and] some working definitions should be given of porn."
Reluctant staff
Tooley adds: "There is a huge problem in that PHSE in schools is often the last thing to have staff timetabled to it. Often they are reluctant staff who are woefully inadequate to teach such things. What is needed are very specialist staff who are committed, experienced, mature and comfortable with these very sensitive issues. Issuing edicts to have such education will not have any benefits until the system of delivery is clearly thought out."
Catherine Harper is the founder of Scottish Women Against Pornography and worked for Brooke Advisory for 11 years. "We need a comprehensive sex education programme," she says. "Access to technology has changed. Mobile porn has replaced internet porn, because you can watch it covertly. The best tool you can give young people is autonomy and knowledge, so they can make informed choices and have positive relationships, including the confidence to say no. If parents saw what was filling the gap, it would destroy them."
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