SYDNEY – After New South Wales state authorities announced plans earlier this month to hold a study into the impact of “harmful pornography”, researchers from the prestigious Australian academic site The Conversation have questioned the blatantly negative wording of the project.
New South Wales Attorney-General Michael Daley has asked a parliamentary committee to “investigate and report on the impact of violent and misogynistic pornographic material on mental, emotional and physical health,” according to Australia’s ABC News. reported.
“A generation of young men is growing up with unprecedented access to the online world, and this includes early and easy access to pornography, with harmful depictions of the treatment of women,” Daley told the press on August 2. inquiry will provide insight into the full impact of harmful online pornography and young people’s access to it for the first time in our state.”
This week, Giselle Woodley and Lelia Green from Edith Cowan University, whose research is part of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project “Adolescents’ Perceptions of Harm from Accessing Online Sexual Content”, published a article in The Conversation, noting that “the research’s negative framing risks revisiting old arguments, rather than advancing debate and policy.”
According to Woodley and Green, politicians, the mainstream press, and vocal anti-porn and anti-sex work activists have centered the debate around the potential harm to teens, but “very few people have interviewed teens about it.”
“As part of our research, we asked teens about their experiences with porn and found that many have a nuanced understanding of the risks, as well as the benefits,” they wrote.
Woodley and Green’s research found that, contrary to the prejudices of anti-porn activists as filtered through politicians and the media, “teenagers have very mixed views about both porn and sexting” and that “some of these views were positive .”
Porn, the authors also found, “can provide a more accessible and explicit representation of sex and bodies that schools cannot provide.”
The authors recommend that policymakers and researchers “listen to teenagers and give more weight to their first-hand experiences than to second-hand explanations. Secondhand statements repeat warnings that teens hear from others. Their actual experiences may differ from those depicted in the media.”
Main image: Michael Daley, Attorney General of New South Wales