Why teachers need to talk about pornography to stop epidemic of sexual violence

Weaning our children off hardcore pornography will not be easy but it must be done

We need to talk about sex. Or at least the version of sex that our young people are devouring online. Sex where it is ‘normal’ for a man to choke a woman to the verge of her passing out. Sex where violence, including rape, is considered acceptable behaviour.

Sex where young women boast about having group sex, preferably in front of a camera. Shocking? Certainly, but for many of our young people, perhaps the majority, this is how they perceive sexual relationships. For a generation raised on hardcore pornography, sexual abuse is mainstream. Normal even.

I thought I was impervious to shock, but on Tuesday morning I sat in a room in central Edinburgh listening to a group of experts in sexual health and violence against women calmly explain how our children’s minds are being distorted – literally – by the easy availability of pornography.

While boys may have once passed round dog-eared copies of Playboy behind the bike sheds, today’s young men have hardcore pornography in their blazer pocket, sadistic sex just one click away on their smartphone.

READ MORE: School iPad pornography alert issued to parents of 35,000 Scottish children

Social media can provide easy access to pornography that rewires the teenage brain and is as addictive as cocaine (Picture: Matt Cardy) | Getty Images

Porn stars on TikTok

Easy access to pornography rewires the teenage brain. It is as addictive as cocaine. The dopamine hit from watching “breath play” – a euphemism for strangulation – is as important to an adolescent as the junk food they crave. And it's not just boys who are affected.

One of the most popular TikTok brands is the Bop House, a group of beautiful young women who share a Florida mansion where they make “adult content” for OnlyFans. Many of their 90 million followers on social media are teenage girls, convinced that creating porn is an aspirational lifestyle choice.

READ MORE: Majority of Scots want to see pimping websites banned

The seminar organised by Beira’s Place – the female-only Edinburgh support service founded by author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling in 2022 – was no mere talking shop. It was designed with a practical purpose in mind, as the centre’s chief executive, Lesley Johnston, explained: “We hope to leave attendees with ideas for concrete action that can be taken in order to address the impact of pornography on levels of violence against women.”

And while the evidence from the panel experts was at times profoundly depressing, it was countered with some optimism. Mary Sharpe, chief executive of the Reward Foundation, a charity which provides free training materials for schools and parents, pointed out that while internet pornography is one of the key drivers of the epidemic of violence against women and girls, there is hope that the trend can be reversed.

“The good news is that when users quit porn the brain settles down and appreciation of women often improves,” she said.

Teachers self-censoring in class

But how to get young people to quit what has become for many a daily habit? An expert in teacher education believes the answer lies in how teachers themselves are taught. Shereen Benjamin, a senior lecturer in primary education at the University of Edinburgh, told me that teachers and student teachers find it “extraordinarily difficult” to discuss porn and its impact on children and young people.

“Frank discussions become impossible as people self-censor through fear of being seen as insufficiently knowledgeable, as prudish, or alternatively as knowing too much,” she said. And she suggested that any roomful of student teachers will almost certainly contain people who have been affected, and possibly traumatised, by their own experiences of online porn. “This makes it even harder to raise the issues,” she said.

Many schools deal with the difficult subject of pornography by inviting outside agencies to help deliver relationships, sexual health and parenthood (RSHP) education for their students, but Benjamin believes the use of external providers prevents teachers from developing ways of handling the topic in the classroom.

“Whilst it may be tempting for school leaders to respond by inviting outside agencies to deliver classroom input on porn, this does not tackle the problem of porn being a ‘no-go area’ for teachers, and there are risks associated with handing any part of the curriculum over to unaccountable outside groups,” she said.

The way to equip teachers with the skills to handle challenging topics such as porn was by teaching them how to approach the subject with “courage, openness and intellectual rigour”, Benjamin argued.

Abusive teenage relationships

Another intervention may be as straightforward as banning mobile phones in schools. Conference delegates heard evidence that smartphones are used by boys, not only to access pornography or to blackmail a girl by threatening to send intimate material to her parents, but to control their girlfriends in the classroom.

Anne Robertson Brown, executive director of Women’s Aid in Angus, said that often boys will demand photographic evidence of where a girl is sitting in class. And the scale of abusive teenage relationships, often fuelled by porn, is such that Angus Women’s Aid has established a project that supports girls under 18 suffering abuse. “We have a major issue,” she said. “It is not just in Angus. It is across Scotland.”

Pornography is big business. Platforms such as OnlyFans and Pornhub earn tens of millions for their owners, and they are rapidly becoming an accepted part of our contemporary culture. And despite 30 years of campaigning by women’s groups and significant changes in the law, sexual violence against women and girls is on the rise.

The police recorded almost 64,000 incidents of domestic abuse in 2023-24, an increase of 3 per cent compared to the previous year. And 37 per cent of sexual crimes recorded in 2022–23 involved victims under 18.

Weaning our children off hardcore pornography will not be easy. It will likely require a tougher regulatory framework for social media, a ban on mobile phones in schools, and more effective training and support for teachers so that they can cope with the epidemic of porn in Scotland’s classrooms.

But first we need to start talking about the problem. It may be embarrassing for some, but it is too urgent to ignore.