Schools
Kia ora and thank you for joining the conversation about porn and young people.
You’re probably aware that the porn landscape for young people has changed dramatically over the last five years. It’s changed in terms of how much porn is available, its ease of access, how frequently young people watch it and the type of porn that is considered normal.
Porn has now become a primary sex educator for young people(7,19), influencing youth sexual culture in new and diverse ways – which is why it’s more important than ever that schools are equipped to be part of the porn conversation with students.
I definitely feel like the conversation about porn should be talked about a lot more in schools and from professionals. You have like sex ed class – but you don’t talk about porn?
—NZ male, 20 yrs(47)
THE PORN INDUSTRY ISN’T GOING AWAY ANYTIME SOON…
so school leaders, teachers and staff can play an important role in helping young people navigate it, by equipping them with porn literacy skills. Sounds complicated? It’s not really… Porn literacy is simply a set of skills to help young people unpack and analyse porn. It enables them to critically examine and identify the negative messages in porn and understand how porn messaging relates to real life sexuality in terms of consent, respect, emotional connection, safety and health.
By helping young people to develop their own porn literacy, we’re equipping them with the knowledge and tools to make informed and healthy decisions around porn; minimising potential long-term harm.
We’ve put together some resources …
to help with this based on feedback we received from New Zealand schools in a recent youth stakeholder survey: Porn and Young People – what do we know? The survey indicated that most school staff (84%) felt that porn was an issue for young people but many felt ill-equipped to engage on the issue in their workplace (25). They identified key resources they felt could be useful, and we’ve made a start on these below and if you would like to direct youth to this site, click here for a graphic to use on your social media platforms.