Up against it: the urgency of confronting our children’s exposure to pornography, by writer and Women’s Equality Party Camden branch co-leader Leah Jewett

Never having grown up with an endless supply of explicit sexual images at the touch of a mobile phone or on screens in their own homes, today’s adults are in denial about the extent to which their digital-native children have to confront and negotiate their way around pornography. Unequipped to talk openly about it, parents stay silent and teachers often feel too awkward to have honest conversations with students.

Pornography underpins a multitude of interrelated concerns: body image, self-esteem, sexting, respect, consent, pleasure, positive sexual identity, harmful gender stereotypes, confidence, unrealistic expectations, victim blaming, girls’ knowledge of their own bodies, detrimental effects on men, sexual violence, the degradation of women etc.

Now that children unintentionally come across porn, are shown it by schoolfriends or actively search for it out of curiosity by the time they’re of secondary school age, they are being exposed to often extreme and disturbing images before they’ve had a chance to even kiss or hold hands with someone. Already, before they’re ready to process or relate to what they’re seeing, their inner life and worldview have been hijacked.

A multibillion-pound industry that often involves coercion, exploitation and sometimes trafficking, porn is male driven. When boys and men watch it, they’re implicitly participating in acts that hurt and demean women and girls. When girls and women watch porn, they are looking at it through the male gaze; they are watching their own subjugation and internalising the message that it’s OK for sex to involve pain.

Images that used to be considered hardcore are now mainstream, and the world around us has become pornified – just look at the objectification of the female (and increasingly male) body on TV and on billboards, and in advertising, movies, TV, magazines, music videos, casually violent video games. These images hold us hostage to a nonstop bombardment of unattainable ideals, and for women disempowerment.

It's vital that we empower girls to accept themselves, be assertive, defy our culture and define themselves on their own terms; equally, we must get boys to challenge their behaviour and attitudes, and to express themselves.

Neuroscience shows that with any addiction people get caught up in a cycle of stimulation followed by desensitisation. As physiology teacher Gary Wilson says about the rewiring of the brain: “Constant novelty-at-a-click can cause addiction.” The website YourBrainOnPorn.com, which features his Ted talk on how porn addiction changes the chemistry and architecture of the brain, cites symptoms such as sexual dysfunction, “loss of attraction to real partners, social anxiety, depression, brain fog, lack of motivation” and “morphing sexual tastes”. His work also shows that this is reversible.

At age nine Bethany McDonald, now 24, became addicted to watching porn in secret. “The only way I could get those disturbing images out of my head,” she says, “was to have them on the screen in front of me.” On another note she reflects: “There's an expectation that [girls] should look and act like a porn star.”

The solution is for all of us, adults and children, to be open – and the conversation has to start early and often. It will serve boys and girls in good stead over time if they can pass critical judgement on images in our hypersexualised media and be comfortable talking frankly about their bodies from a young age. Blazing a trail is the sex education proven effective in places like Denmark (officially the happiest nation on the planet since 1973), Holland and Sweden, all of which have high levels of wellbeing.

For real change to happen, it has to be enshrined in law. It is a state of emergency that British children do not have the right to good-quality sex and relationship education (SRE), which is why the Women’s Equality Party’s campaign is 100% necessary.

We are at a tipping point in terms of exerting pressure on the government. Last month's alarming report from the Women and Equalities Committee, ‘Sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools’, states: “There is evidence of a correlation between children’s regular viewing of pornography and harmful behaviours.”

It demands that the government “immediately update its guidance on SRE to include teaching about pornography… in an age-appropriate way. It should also include suggestions of how schools can work in partnership with parents to address the impact of pornography on children’s perceptions of sex, relationships and consent.”

This is a categorical call to arms. It’s urgent that we take preventative measures to keep porn from taking people to dark emotional places where they don’t want to be.

We don’t want our girls to be fixated on pleasing boys at the expense of knowing and pleasing themselves; we don’t want to them to witness, over and over, the degradation of other women and expect it of their own sexual experiences.

And we don’t want our boys to be conditioned to find the degradation of women arousing or to be trapped in limited versions of masculinity which deprive them of being able to express a whole range of emotions including sensitivity and vulnerability.

Nobody knows what impact porn is having, and will have long term, on young people. They’re canaries down a very dark mine.