Teens use 'Bart Simpson' defence over Internet porn?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 05 February 2007 13:33

Your IT - Home IT

"I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything!" came to mind when I read reports of a US study from the University of New Hampshire that found two-thirds of 10-17 year olds who admitted seeing online pornography weren't trying to find the material when they encountered it.

I don't think my typing or searching skills have improved significantly in the last couple of years - in fact I seem to miskey more often with my current keyboard than any previous one I've used - but it's been ages since I've accidentally stumbled across a porn site. (No, you don't detect a note of regret!)

There was a time when innocent searches - especially for popular celebrities - would return multiple links to sites that would be X rated in some jurisdictions and Refused Classification in others, but the main search engines seem to have cleaned up their act.

And typosquatting seems less common, and when I do run into examples the destination pages are nowhere near as seedy as they used to be. www.mircosoft.com was a particularly nasty example, and it was all to easy to type that in place of www.microsoft.com.

Another excuse was that the teens sometimes ran into porn via popup ads or spam. In my experience, legitimate web sites don't run porn ads. And while porn spam still reaches my inbox with irritating frequency, it's been years since a "free sample" was included. In any case the subject lines are usually pretty clear about what's on offer, and you need to click a link to get to the images.

Don't take any of this as an assertion that porn is OK. Reuters quotes the study thus: "Some youth may be psychologically and developmentally unprepared for unwanted exposure, and online images may be more graphic and extreme than pornography available from other sources," which sounds like a sensible warning to me.

All I'm questioning is whether that 28 percent (two-thirds of the 42 percent that report being exposed to online porn) of respondents really didn't play an active role in getting those images onto their screens. It just doesn't match up with my experience as a heavy - if significantly older - Internet user.