This letter comes with a sensitive content warning. It discusses sex, pornography and violence, and the importance of protecting teens from the excesses of the internet.
A few years ago, I interviewed a group of 16-year-old girls – with their parents’ permission – about sex and porn.
I’d been working on stories about schoolgirls who’d been sexually assaulted by their schoolmates. In a couple of cases, boys had put a hand to their throats. Experts were saying that easy access to violent porn was glamorising behaviour that could be extremely dangerous in real life, especially when engaged in by fumbling teenagers. I wanted to find out what teen girls thought. I was shocked by what I heard.
One had a boyfriend who’d watch porn – “the rough stuff” – on his phone at school. She played along, even though she didn’t like it. “I was 13,” she said. “I thought that’s what was expected of me.” Another said boys would send her porn. “I felt I had to live up to that,” she said. They’d assumed strangulation (which is never safe, and can lead to death, stroke and brain injury), hair pulling and verbal degradation were standard in sex, even though they confessed it made them uncomfortable.
It’s easy to forget, as adults, how vulnerable teens are during their early sexual exploration, and how much they worry about not knowing what to do and being laughed at and judged by their peers.
By the time I spoke to these girls, at age 16, they’d begun to realise that they didn’t have to do things that made them uncomfortable. But it had been a hell of a learning curve. They were worldly, angry and traumatised. I felt for the boys as well. Without adults in their life willing to have frank conversations about the difference between online and real life sex, and what respect and enthusiastic consent actually look like, they probably thought they were doing what was expected of them, too.
I couldn’t help feeling that my generation had let them down by not pushing harder to protect them from the excesses of the internet.
Much has changed since that conversation, back in 2023. There are social media restrictions for under 16s, which may not have been resoundingly successful in practice, but were – as Waleed Aly wrote this week – a political watershed in terms of saying no to rampant Big Tech. The eSafety commissioner now requires porn sites operating in Australia to use age verification technology, which made some quit our shores in protest (new players have filled the gap, and teen users have worked out how to access porn overseas).
There are phone bans in schools, so at least there’s no overt watching of porn in class.
The federal government is also developing a digital duty of care to force platforms to proactively act on foreseeable harms. As there must be, there’s an active debate about what’s possible or practical, and how the privacy of adults can be protected in the process.
But these reforms haven’t touched the sides of the problem, as we’ve learnt in Sydney over the past month from two sexual assaults by trios of alleged teenage perpetrators (in one case, the accused boys were aged 13 and 14), and the death of a girl after a suspected act of sexual choking. Politicians are concerned. The Herald is, too.
Two potential reforms are at the forefront of the quest for solutions. One, from consent campaigner Chanel Contos, is to force tech companies to make algorithms optional and to give Australians more control over what they see on their social media. This reform is backed by federal Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek, who last weekend pointed to research that showed it took an average of 23 minutes for a new social media account mimicking a teenage boy to be recommended violent and misogynistic content online.
The Herald’s Amber Schultz did her own online impersonation of a 17-year-old boy this week, and found it took just 13 minutes to be ushered into the manosphere.
The other is the criminalisation of pornography featuring strangulation, which is often called sexual choking (although technically “choking” refers to a medical emergency resulting from food or an object blocking the windpipe). Britain did this late last year, when it passed laws that required tech platforms to stop UK users seeing such material.
As we’ve seen in Australia, these laws can be hard to police. And it’s not just porn that glamorises sexual “choking”. Romania’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest this year was a song called Choke Me, featuring lyrics such as “I want you to choke me” and “make my lungs explode”.
NSW Premier Chris Minns has backed both reforms. In an interview with the Herald’s state political editor Michael McGowan this week, he expressed his worry that graphic, violent imagery was being “transmitted to young minds without any context or understanding what it means, often before they’ve got any kind of maturity to deal with the implications of seeing it”.
“Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. So this is the problem of our times. Access to that kind of powerful technology in the hands of young people who lack the maturity to understand what it means. If it’s possible to implement that ban, I think we should.”
On Friday, principals, politicians and experts gathered in Sydney for a NSW government round table on the issue, which explored ways to address sexual violence and misogyny among young people. Their resolutions included a new plan to address sexual violence, and another to focus on the experience of women and girls.
Online and media content are only part of the solution. The household and key figures in a teen’s life are hugely influential. Schools can teach consent, but teenage boys are most likely to be protected from engaging in sexually harmful behaviour if they have a counterpoint to that behaviour in real life: the many good men – their fathers, coaches, teachers, uncles, family friends – who treat women with kindness and respect. A boy is most at risk if he consumes contempt for women online, and then watches his father displaying it in his own home. He knows no different. Addressing domestic and family violence is key to addressing this problem.
The answers are not easy. Reining in Big Tech is ambitious, and the genie may be out of the bottle. But we must try. We can’t keep allowing teens to be exposed to vile content then being shocked when their attitudes to intimacy and relationships are corrupted.
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