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Experts say porn can warp childrens' view of sex, so how do we protect them?

Experts say porn can warp childrens' view of sex, so how do we protect them?

It seems 21st-century parents have a lot more to worry about than teens and preteens squirreling copies of Playboy and Penthouse under the mattress.

The openness of the Internet has made accessing pornography, well, child’s play.

Meanwhile, experts warn that widely- and easily-available explicit sex images can potentially damage children’s sexual development by creating a warped sense of what real sex is all about and dehumanizing their image of sexuality.

The issue was the focus of a one-day symposium Monday in Winnipeg organized by Beyond Borders, the Canadian arm of an international advocacy group that focuses on child exploitation.

“You can’t underestimate the proliferation of pornography that’s available freely online and the degree of depravity,” Mark Hecht, an Ottawa law professor and Beyond Borders co-founder, told Yahoo Canada News. “Pornography doesn’t look like it did 20 years ago or 10 years ago.”

Children as young as six and eight years old are viewing online porn, said Cordelia Anderson, a Minneapolis consultant whose work includes the areas of sexual violence, child abuse, exploitation and pornography.

For the youngest, the encounters are mostly inadvertent or they’re exposed by older siblings or friends, said Anderson, who spoke at the conference.

But little is being done in Canada or the United States to curb children’s access to porn, compared with Europe and Britain, where Internet service providers and mobile phone companies have agreed to an opt-in approach to filtering porn sites. They’re blocked unless users can verify their age.

[ Related: Should Canada follow Britain’s lead in blocking online porn? ]

“We haven’t had that same mobilization of will,” Anderson said in an interview. “We haven’t had that same political leadership.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron pressured ISPs and telecoms to institute the rules voluntarily, threatening regulation if they didn’t, Anderson said.

John Carr, a prominent British activist, told the conference that credit card companies are also being pushed to stop processing payments from porn sites.

“These are things that are happening in the U.K. that aren’t happening in Canada,” Beyond Borders director David Matas told Yahoo Canada News.

“There’s a large amount of interest in this but I think the technology has gotten ahead of the legislators, the administrators and the police and so on,” he said. “The people using the system are a lot more technologically adept than the people trying to control the problem.”

Matas, a Winnipeg human rights lawyer, noted pedophiles often use pornography to groom potential victims.

“It’s very often sexual predators who are trying to get at children and use pornography as a way normalizing, habituating, desensitizing and grooming children to participate in sexual abuse,” he said.

Efforts to protect children from premature exposure to porn should occur on a number of fronts, starting with parents, said Hecht.

“We don’t want to minimize the importance parents have in this, particularly if we are focusing on boys, who tend to be the greater number of consumers of the pornography,” he said.

But the reality is some parents aren’t comfortable with the topic and a lot of kids aren’t open to hearing it from them, he noted. Schools can help fill that gap, but even those that offer classroom sex education tend to limit it to the biological aspects the birds and the bees. They avoid the wider social discussion about sexual relationships.

“It’s tough enough to get quality, evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education in the schools,” said Anderson, referring to the U.S. experience. “To talk specifically about this issue is still not widely accepted.”

[ Related: Pornography, kids and sex education: what to do? ]

Sex education needs to be more than just about bodily functions, said Matas.

“I think sex education has to go beyond ‘this is how babies are born,’” he said. “Children are accessing pornography, but it’s not discussed in the schools at all.”

Hecht said there’s a correlation between easy access to adult porn and the proliferation of ‘sexting’ among the young.

The Generation XXX symposium was well-attended and included senior police officials, Crown prosecutors and defence lawyers, but it’s time to move discussion of the issue up from the grassroots to those that make policy decisions to school boards and the halls of government.

“And of course you want to have the young people, particularly those who are older, as part of that discussion as well,” Matas said.

Ontario is in the opening stages of a introducing a province-wide sex education program next year, starting with a survey of parents this fall to get feedback on what it should entail.

“The ease and prevalence of access to online pornography has been identified by experts as an area of concern,” Education Ministry spokesman Gary Wheeler said via email. “It is not a topic that is explicitly referenced in the current health and physical education curriculum.

“The updated health and physical education curriculum will be revised to ensure it is current and accurate and reflects needs of students today and government policies.”

So while non-profit groups like Beyond Borders can have a role in raising awareness and reaching out to children, the burden remains on parents, Hecht said.

While it might not seem appropriate to broach the topic of porn with a five-year-old child, Hecht said that’s not too young to begin talking about bodily boundaries. As kids get older, they’ll come to parents with their own questions, which eventually can lead into a discussion on what pornography is and is not.