Sync-blog
By Rhonda Callow
June 3, 2010

An infographic called “The Stats on Internet Pornography” offers up some surprising – and some expected – results. Should parents be keeping a closer eye on their children’s internet use, or is it inevitable: kids want to see porn just as much as adults do?

A recent infographic published by OnlineMBA.com shows us some interesting statistics on internet pornography, such as:

40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites
70% of men between the ages of 18-24 visit porn sites in a typical month
1 in 3 porn viewers are women
1 in 4 search engine requests are porn related
20% of men admit to watching porn online at work
Most popular day of the week for viewing porn is Sunday

One of the pornography statistics listed on the infographic said that the average age at which a child first sees porn online is 11. Wow.

Now, you have to wonder why kids, on average, are experiencing their first online porn encounter at such a young age. Is it because parents aren’t monitoring their kids’ online activities close enough? Perhaps parents aren’t securing their computer well enough or setting the parental controls?

That would probably be your first assumption, right? However, if you look at a post I wrote a while ago about Symantec’s list called “Kids’ Top 100 Searches of 2009″, you would find that the fourth most popular search word for children 7 and under is “porn”, whilst the word “sex” comes in fourth for children between the ages of 8-18, with “porn” coming in not far behind.

Equipped with that information, do you still think kids are seeing internet porn at 11 due to slack parenting? One could argue that if a parent was monitoring their children close enough, the opportunity to search for porn wouldn’t be made available to them. But is that really a fair argument? Kids have an arsenal of portable devices these days which enable them to go online just about anywhere. That means that even if you monitor them closely at home by getting them to use child-friendly search engines and ensuring you’ve set up OpenDNS or other parental controls, you still might not be able to stop them when they’re at a friend’s house or somewhere where there’s public access to the internet (like the library!).

So, whether our children are viewing internet porn at 11 because they’re looking for it, or because they accidentally stumble upon it (or even a combination of the two!), is it something parents need to be more concerned about? Is a child who looks for porn on the internet really any worse than the 11-year-old kids from yesteryear who stole their old man’s nudie magazines and hid out in their tree fort looking at them through the dim beam of their flashlight?

Find full article here: http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2010/06/internet-porn-stats-should-parents-be-concerned.html