Teenagers watch 87 hours worth of pornography a year

5.10.2012 | By: Tadej Pačnik

Read about how much time teenagers spend on the Internet and what they’re looking for. Pornography is among the main hits.

It’s commendable that teenagers use the Internet to help them with their homework. (PhotoXpress)

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Average teenager

An average teenager spends an hour and forty minutes on the Internet every week looking for pornography. This adds up to 87 hours a year. Does that seem a lot or little? They spend an hour and 35 minutes browsing through contents about weight loss and diets. The survey conducted on 1,000 teenagers revealed that an average teenager spends 31 hours a week on the Internet on average. They’re mostly interested in soft pornography, plastic surgery, diets, family planning and emotional support. They spend an hour and eight minutes on sites about plastic surgery, breast enlargement, liposuction and collagen implants. The survey was conducted by the company Cyber Sentinel, which represents programming equipment enabling parents to track their children’s use of the Internet and block certain sites. Directress of marketing Ellie Puddle had this to say: “The alarming thing is the survey shows teenagers are obviously exploring all sorts of topics as a result of modern-day pressures.”

Sex and education

”The research has also found that they're viewing information on contraceptives and pregnancy and sex as well as weight loss. And for some reason they find it easier to go online to conduct their research than asking mum and dad for advice. Using the internet to research topics which are difficult to talk about is fine, but parents should agree and set boundaries to protect their children from accessing inappropriate material.” The survey revealed that teenagers spend at least 3 hours and 10 minutes every week looking for subjects to help them with their homework and an hour and forty minutes to download and listen to music. A further two hours are spent on YouTube, an hour and 22 minutes is spent browsing sites with medical or educational contents, diseases, puberty and the likes. Chat rooms, forums, Msn and Facebook play an important role in the lives of teenagers. They spend 9 hours and 40 minutes there a week, getting to know new friends and chatting.

Cyber sentinel or the Internet sentinel

Cyber Sentinel is a programme which enables parents pretty good supervision of what the children are doing on the Internet. If it works and how skilled a child must be to avoid it is another matter. We have to know that teenagers are interested in “inappropriate material”, it’s out there and will reach the teenagers if they want it or not. What your children are doing on the Internet can be found out with a simple look at the history of the visited websites. But it’s hard to assess the long-term effect of Internet and the “inappropriate” contents the teenagers are exposed to. What is more hurtful for a child: Knowing nothing about sexuality or seeing two Brazilian transsexuals having sex, drinking the sperm in the end and farting into one another’s face? It may seem that the child will be scarred for life, but the advocates of surveillance are very much exaggerating. I can give such a statement because there is no credible survey which could measure this influence. We need the Cyber Sentinel programme to protect our children or we can choose a different method. We show the teenager everything and say this is how the world is, these are the people, are you going to waste your time with this or make something out of yourself? To each his or her own.