I really don’t believe that teenagers sending naked pictures of themselves to one another is fuelled by the availability of pornography. It is fuelled by the availability of cameras. You can take a naked picture of yourself in a few seconds and text it off without thinking about it.
I’m sure that somewhere a girl has been pressured into taking naked pictures by the normalcy of porn and somewhere a girl has refused to have such a picture taken, saying, “If you want to look at naked girls, there’s the internet.” I’m sure that for some kids looking at porn gives them ideas that they then try out and for others it satisfies a curiosity and makes them decide not to do that.
It’s not that I think that porn has no influence on behaviour, everything does. But parents have pretty much always spent a lot of time fretting that their children will do exactly the same kinds of things they did when they were young, and kids have pretty much always done those things anyway.
I agree that the best defence kids have against making bad decisions is education and empowerment. I think the proposal by the UK government runs exactly counter to those ideas.
