An article titled “How to talk to your kids about porn” in one of Britain’s leading newspapers, The Guardian, features Culture Reframed‘s Parents of Tweens Program, which is designed to build resilience and resistance to hypersexualized media and porn in kids.
How to talk to your kids about porn
(before the pornographers do)
By Julie Bindel, originally published in The Guardian on Thursday, October 25th, 2018
“Want to talk to your eight-year-old child about pornography and have no idea how to start? Worried that your 10-year-old might be sexting? Concerned that the only sex education your 12-year-old has access to consists of images of sexual degradation?
Freely accessible porn is driving sexually aggressive behavior against women and girls. Nearly 90% of the most-watched porn scenes contain violence against women, according to a widely cited study. This is why parents need to talk to their kids about porn, before the pornographers do. But how? A new and unique program aimed at parents of tweens (between the ages of eight and 12) who want to have the “porn conversation” may help.
The program, run by a new US-based NGO called Culture Reframed, founded by the academic and anti-porn activist Gail Dines, is the first to approach this complex issue from a feminist perspective. It aims to teach parents how to have conversations with their children, and was created by experts in public health, adolescent psychology, sexual health education, neuroscience and technology.
Free to parents, it claims to tackle what Dines calls the “public health crisis of the digital age”. She backs up her claims with hard facts and figures. For a start, a third of all young people under the age of 12 have seen pornography; about 20% of sexts are photos of girls under the age of 15; and 35% of all internet downloads are porn. Also, children have access to a mobile phone at earlier ages than they did five years ago. Today, an estimated 25% of six-year-olds in the UK use a mobile phone, and the average age in the US is 10. This means that large groups of young children are just a click or two away from free hardcore porn.”