More children consume porn

Danish teens watch porn, and a lot of it. A total of 98 percent of boys aged between 12 to 20 reported consuming porn of some form, while 86 percent of their female peers did the same.

The statistics come from a study by the Nordic Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Research (NIKK) leaked to daily newspaper MetroXpress. The results were to be presented at a conference on Youth, Gender and Pornography Films to be held in Oslo this September.

Easy access and anonymity provided by the internet were in large part to blame for boys as young as 12 accessing porn, the study showed.

'Pornography has seeped in as a normal part of the media consumption of children and young people. There are no barriers, porno is where the young are, namely the internet,' said Rune Gade, a researcher in pornography at Copenhagen University.

Gade also said that the rise in porn consumption can also be attributed to a general sexualisation of childhood and the increased tendency to regard sex as a commodity. He also suggested that sex education in public schools should be revamped and modernised.

'We should be worried about this. We need to ask ourselves if it is the pornography industry that should be in charge of sex education for our children. Porn gives a very one-dimensional picture, which to a grotesque degree, focuses on genital contact,' said Gade.

Niels Ulrik Sørensen, a researcher at the Danish University of Education in boys' use of pornography, said that boys are generally able to draw lines, but in recent times those lines have inevitably been redrawn as a result of the explosion of the porn industry.

'Boys want both - both intimacy with a partner and porn, which they primarily use for masturbation, but also for inspiration,' said Sørensen.

The NIKK study shows that when girls do make an entrance into sexual intercourse, they often find themselves pressured to try things they do not want to. Sørensen's research also finds that while boys do not have as hard a time distinguishing between pornographic depictions and reality, girls feel pressured to live up to the images portrayed in pornography.

A total of 1,000 young Danes participated in the study through a questionnaire found on the internet.