COPENHAGEN, March 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A professor of sexology at Aalborg University has suggested that showing children pornography in school would help children better understand sexuality.
Christian Graugaard said he hopes by watching hardcore porn, children will realize that it differs from real-life sex.
Graugaard told the Danish public broadcaster DR that if children try to act out what they see online, it could result in “broken necks and disappointment,” so he thinks schools should help teenagers distinguish between porn and real life. That process, he said, would involve showing them more porn.
“Instead of having sex education be boring and technical, where you roll a condom onto a cucumber, I’d rather have us educate our children to be critical consumers who see porn with a certain distance and reflection,” Graugaard said.
Danish studies indicate that almost all teenage boys and 86 percent of teenage girls have seen porn. One survey carried out last October found that three quarters of Danish men and a third of Danish women watch online porn regularly.
Critics say that, while giving children an understanding that porn leads to unrealistic expectations about sex and can lead to serious social problems, society ignores the harm inherent in watching any form of porn.
In her research into porn, Dr. Judith Reisman – who authored the book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud – found that frequent use of pornography develops into an addiction and can damage the structure and the function of the brain by changing its chemistry.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE), the U.S.-based group behind the “Porn Harms” campaign, has gathered a massive amount of research describing how pornography harms children and adults.
Enough Is Enough, a resource website for parents concerned about internet porn, notes that porn:
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“has a negative impact on the emotional and mental health of children”;
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“facilitates sexual aggression”;
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“desensitizes the viewer and increases an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography”; and
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“contains images that can never be erased” from the child's mind.
Studies show when a child or adolescent encounters internet pornography, it can have lasting negative or even traumatic effects on the child’s sense of security and sexuality, according to Dr. Jill Manning, a marriage and family therapist specializing in research and clinical work related to pornography and problematic sexual behavior.
Dr. Manning, told U.S. lawmakers that pornography “promotes the belief that superior sexual satisfaction is attainable without having affection for one’s partner, thereby reinforcing the commoditization of sex and the objectification of humans, and that children who have been exposed have an increased risk for developing sexual compulsions and addictive behavior.”
Cathy Cleaver Ruse, a Senior Fellow for Legal Studies at the Family Research Council, has written that porn use affects all members of the family, not just the porn addict.
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“Pornography devastates marriages, as husbands report to loving their spouses less due to the addiction,” she wrote, “and the wives of these users have deep psychological wounds, with feelings of betrayal, mistrust, and anger towards their partner, sometimes requiring clinical treatment for trauma.”
“Not only does it eliminate an affectionate family life,” she said, but “children can experience traumas related to encounters with their parents' pornographic material.”
“A study of adolescents revealed that viewing sexually explicit internet materials can significantly increase their uncertainties about sexuality, can lower their self-esteem, and bring about feelings of loneliness and depression,” Cleaver Ruse said.
