Recent years have seen a resurgence of public discussions and (moral) panics about a range of pornography-related topics, the expansion of pornography across the internet, its putative links to rape and sexual violence, and erotic life-styling or the oft-cited ‘sexualization’ of culture. Horvath (2013) makes the point that access to pornography is frequently done by young people on their own, or in peer groups away from adults, making supervision difficult and regulation of the images impossible. This is in keeping with other recently published and frequently cited work which highlights the potentially negative consequences of this unrestricted access, arguing that it results in increases of sexual bullying, harassment and sexting. (Horvath et al, 2013,Ringrose, et al and 2012, Phippen 2012). There is clearly a worry that this unfettered access poses risks to young people, most notably in terms of the detrimental impact on their ability to develop a healthy sexual identity and form healthy relationships. This paper will share our preliminary research findings from an ongoing project, which involves young people as active participants and captures their experiences as consumers of porn. Initial findings suggest that young people are not simply passive consumers of everything they view. They are adept and use a critical range of skills and perspectives to interpret sexual content. Overwhelming agreement seemed to be that young people were using porn to gain a wider understanding of their sexual identity and fill in gaps about sex education. (246 words) Bibliography Horvath, M., Alys, L., Massey, K., Pina, A., Scally, M. and Adler, A. 2013 “Basically... porn is everywhere” A Rapid Evidence Assessment on the Effects that Access and Exposure to Pornography has on Children and Young People Education Journal, 164 Phippen, A. (2012) Sexting: An Exploration of Practices, Attitudes and Influences NSPCC/John Wiley and Sons Ringrose, J. Gill, R. Livingstone, S. & Harvey, L. 2012 A Qualitative Study of Children Young People and ‘Sexting’ : A report prepared for the NSPCC/John Wiley and Sons Dr. Erika Laredo Youth and Community Development at Leeds Beckett Universit
