Young people and sexually explicit content online: Exploring Australian parents’ concerns

Abstract

Ongoing discussion between parents and their children, including listening to young people, is essential to enable young people to safely navigate the online sexual ecosystem. Research suggests, however, that parents and their children conceptualise and discuss online risks in different ways. This article documents findings from interviews and focus groups with 40 Australian parents exploring their perspectives and concerns about online pornography, and provides insights into the extent to which the adults report listening to and engaging with young people. It reveals that while parents are concerned about online pornography, most do not know what their children are doing online and do not appear to be discussing the issue with their children in ways which explore their children’s experiences, perspectives and concerns. It concludes by suggesting that education about online pornography be extended to parents so that they are better able to support young people in navigating the online sexual ecosystem.

Introduction

This article takes a cultural studies approach to understanding parents’ concerns about young people and sexually explicit content online. Such an approach is interdisciplinary. Our work here is poststructuralist, using textual analysis to map out the discourses used by parents and caregivers in making sense of this issue. This is not a positivist study. It deploys what researchers from positivist quantitative approaches might describe as an ‘editorial comment’ approach in relation to the communication of findings. Our conceptual framework comes from a sexual health perspective, particularly drawing on a multidisciplinary model of healthy sexual development (McKee et al., 2010). A key element of healthy sexual development is ‘open communication’ between parents and their children about sexuality.

It is widely accepted in the domains of sex education that parents play an important role in the sex education of young people, and comfort in communicating with young people is vital to doing this successfully (Klein et al., 2005; Malacane and Beckmeyer, 2016). A number of resources exist to support parents in this work, including Planned Parenthood’s Talking Parents, Healthy Teens (Schuster et al., 2008) and Talk Soon, Talk Often (Walsh, 2011). These resources make clear that listening skills for talking about sensitive topics are vital for parents to provide the support they need to navigate healthy sexual development. The prevalence of online pornography, and collective concerns about its potential risks, necessitates a similar parent/child communicative approach to the issue.

This article presents data from a project exploring parents’ perspectives and concerns about online pornography and the extent to which the adults report listening to and engaging with young people about these issues as an active and engaged process of sex education. Through qualitative interviews and focus groups with 40 Australian parents of teenagers aged 12–16, it seeks to gain insights into parental anxieties about online pornography and sexting, determine the factors that shape those perspectives and anxieties, and how parents address those concerns.

Literature review

There is a significant body of research which establishes the importance of open parent/child communication about sex and sexuality-related issues for children’s healthy sexual development and sexual wellbeing (see for example Byrne et al., 2014; Hadley et al., 2009; Klein et al., 2005; Malacane and Beckmeyer, 2016; Walker, 2004). There are, however, few studies which explicitly explore parental concerns and discussions with their children about online pornography. Studies that do exist show that online pornography is a concern for parents, who desire open communication about sex and pornography with their children. Indeed, many surveyed parents indicate that they rely on an ‘open’ and ‘honest’ relationship with their children as a primary strategy for managing concerns about pornography and other online risks (Davis et al., 2021; Page Jeffery, 2021). Despite parental desire for open discussion, however, studies show that most parents are in fact unlikely to raise the topic of online pornography with their children. Such a finding is consistent with studies which show that in many families, open discussions about sex are uncommon (Beckett et al., 2010, cited in Rothman et al., 2017). Scholars have found several barriers to such discussions, including embarrassment; discomfort; concern that they may spark their children’s sexual curiosity or ‘open a can of worms’; lack of relevant skills and knowledge, and fear that they may compromise their child’s innocence (Malacane and Beckmeyer, 2016; Zurcher, 2017). In a qualitative study involving 20 Australian parents, Davis et al. (2021) found that many parents would not initiate a conversation about online pornography until they were certain that their child had been exposed, a finding which they note is consistent with other studies. Considering that the average age of first exposure to online pornography is 13 (eSafety Research, 2023), and that parents generally underestimate their children’s exposure to online risk (Byrne et al., 2014) we can safely assume that if and when parents do raise the topic with their children, they are leaving it too late.

Surveyed parents typically have negative perceptions in relation to their children’s exposure or consumption of online pornography, despite this being a regular occurrence, especially among older children (Weber et al., 2012; Zurcher, 2017). Fear, discomfort, and a lack of sexual and technological communication openness/knowledge were conveyed by parents (Zurcher, 2017). In terms of the key messages that parents felt their children should be given about online pornography, these largely related to views that pornography is ‘bad’, ‘not a good thing’, and that their children should not watch it. Indeed, many parents hold strong negative opinions about pornography that may frighten children, and shame-based messaging between parents and their children about pornography is prevalent (Rothman et al., 2017; Zurcher, 2017).

Parents’ negative feelings, including fear, towards pornography, are perhaps not surprising. Discussions about young people and online pornography have typically been framed in terms of risk. This ‘risk talk’ is extensive about what we refer to as the ‘digital sexual ecosystem’. We have coined this term in order to describe the system in which young people exercise their digital sexual literacy by ‘reading’ (consuming) and ‘writing’ (producing representations) about sexuality in digital contexts (Aufderheide, 1993). The metaphor of the ‘ecosystem’ allows us to analyse platforms, actors and networks. Each actor ‘has different attributes, decision-making principles and purposes’, best understood in terms of ‘dynamic evolution of the product/service system’ (Tsujimoto et al., 2018: 49).

We can surmise from this brief review of the existing literature that even though parents indicate a desire for open and honest communication with their children, such communications may be too little, too late. We might also deduce that parents’ negative perceptions of pornography likely result in parent-child communication which involves parents imparting negative messages about the potential harms of pornography. There is no evidence in the literature that parents are asking their children about their experiences, thoughts and questions in relation to pornography. This is problematic, as teenagers’ disclosure of information is one of the most effective ways for parents to gain insight into their children’s online practices and preferences (Sorbring and Lundin, 2012), and parents have been shown to be young people’s preferred source of information about sex (Mitchell et al., 2014). One thing is clear from these studies – very few parents surveyed knew how to go about conversing with their children beyond their feelings about the issue (Davis et al., 2021).

Different generations, different discourses

Research with young people about online issues makes clear that the ways in which they conceptualise and discuss these issues, including online pornography and sexting, are often significantly different from the approaches taken by concerned adults. This disconnect has significant implications for open parent/child discussion about online risks. For example, Marwick and Boyd’s (2011) work on cyberbullying found that the term ‘bullying’ was not used by young people:

Although adults often refer to [online practices of conflict] with the language of ‘bullying’, teens are more likely to refer to the resultant skirmishes and their digital traces as ‘drama’. Drama is a performative set of actions distinct from bullying, gossip, and relational aggression, incorporating elements of them but also operating quite distinctly (p. 1).

The difference is more than semantic because it marks distinct discourses that conceive of the issue in quite different ways. This separation

allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency–and save face–rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative (Marwick and Boyd, 2011: 1).

Similarly, when researchers speak to young people about digitally distributed sexually explicit material they find a disjunction between the dominant discourses about this material used by adult stakeholders – parents, policy makers, medical experts, teachers and journalists – and the young people’s experiences. Debates about ‘sexting’ do not match the language that is used by young people in making sense of the practices. For example, a study based on interviews with groups of 16-17 -year-olds undertaken by Albury (2015) reported that participants ‘rejected the imprecision of the term sexting’ (p. 1734) and instead used a typology of ‘pictures’ that included private selfies, public selfies, and inoffensive sexual pictures. Albury (2015) notes that the young people ‘called attention to the ways that the term ‘sexting’ was misapplied to young people’s digital practices’ (p. 1738), with particular reference to the subgenre of ‘joke images’ which typically consist of humourous nude and semi-nude images that are frequently misread by adults. Albury (2015) argues that the sophistication of young people’s typology of sexual self-representation compared to the blanket term ‘sexting’ used by adults illustrates the ‘gaps in adult understandings of selfie practices’ (p. 1735).

Further, young people’s responses to sexually explicit online content is subjective, varied and differs across cultural contexts. Green et al. (2020) report on data from an extensive international survey called EU Kids Online to show that young people in different cultural contexts respond to encountering sexually explicit material in different ways. They note, for example that there is no simple correlation between the numbers of children aged 9-16 who report having seen sexual images online, and those who report being ‘bothered’ (their term) by this exposure.

To understand why this might be we need to get a better sense of how young people make sense of their interactions with sexual material online. When Spišák (2016) surveyed young people about sex, including pornography, she noted that young people were aware of the broader discourses of harm – ‘everywhere they say that it’s harmful but they don’t say how’ (p. 130) – but this did not correspond with their own experiences: ‘I would like to know that is it normal to watch porn with my mates from time to time? Or do me and my mates have some sort of a problem?’ (quoted by Spišák, 2016: 134). Indeed, as Spišák (2016) notes:

blurry notions of harm baffle young people more than the actual pornographic content they encounter. In other words, very few of the young people who contact sexual health experts experience porn itself as harmful. Rather, it is the risk talk that is experienced as unsettling.

A more recent survey undertaken by the eSafety Commissioner provides further empirical weight to these arguments by demonstrating the nuanced ways in which young people perceive online pornography, and how these differ from dominant risk discourses. Far from reproducing ‘risk talk’ which highlights the purported damaging effects of pornography, young people expressed a desire for agency, pleasure, entertainment, education and exploration. Importantly, they expressed the desire to determine when and how they experienced online pornography, as well as the right to avoid it altogether (eSafety Research, 2023). Critically, young people were acutely aware, and critical, of the anti-porn stigma that came from their parents, noting that it created embarrassment and shame around pornography which discouraged young people from seeking information and help from adults (eSafety Research, 2023). One 16 year-old female respondent said: ‘My parents have always taught me that it’s inappropriate content that I should never search for or view’. Another 16 year-old male participant noted: ‘It isn’t bad. Parents just tell kids it is’.

Online pornography and potential harm

For readers who may be concerned that the young people here are missing the reality of harms caused by viewing sexually explicit material it is worth considering the recent overview published by McKee et al in the monograph What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research? Based on a detailed interdisciplinary literature review of research published in the area against the domains of healthy sexual development, they note that:

Although we can identify thousands of pieces of academic research about pornography’s ‘effects’, surprisingly little of it explores relationships between various aspects of healthy sexual development and consumption of pornography. A lack of agreement about what is being measured has led to confusion. Much of the relevant research . . . on the relationship between consumption of pornography and aspects of healthy sexual development misinterpreted correlation and causality (McKee et al., 2022: 94).

They note that there is no consensus in the literature on the relationships between consumption of sexually explicit material and a range of domains of healthy sexual development, including better or worse understandings and practices of consent, knowing how to have good sex, and having a pleasurable sex life (p. 94).

Although there is as yet no clear consensus about harms caused by consuming sexually explicit material, it is also true that it has not been proved that pornography has primarily positive effects. It is therefore important that we keep an open mind about possible harms. Young people have expressed a desire for open dialogue and discussion about pornography, noting that doing so could help mitigate the potential harms they may experience from encounters with online pornography (eSafety Research, 2023). Notwithstanding the shame, stigma and embarrassment in relation to pornography, however, young people consider their parents to be ill-equipped to help them in relation to such matters, with less than one third of young people indicating that they would ask a parent or trusted adult for more information about pornography (eSafety Research, 2023).

With this context in mind, this project reviews data gathered by talking to adults about their concerns about young people and pornography in order to identify the discourses on which they are drawing and the nature of their concerns. Vitally, it gathers evidence of the extent to which parents are engaged in a dialogue with their children about the meaning of these practices, the support the children are seeking from the adults, and whether there is evidence of the kinds of open communication about sex that supports healthy sexual development.

Method

This study draws on findings from a larger project undertaken in 2016-2017 examining parental anxieties about their children’s digital practices. Focus groups and interviews were held with 40 Australian parents of at least one teenager aged 12–16 in the Australian Capital Territory region. Parental concerns and perspectives in relation to online pornography and sexting were not the specific focus of this study, but rather emerged as distinct themes from the broader study. The primary research questions guiding the larger study were: (1) What are parents’ anxieties and concerns in relation to their teenage children’s use of digital technologies? And (2) How do parents address those concerns in relation to their children? Interviews did not specifically ask parents the extent to which they listened to their children’s perspectives on these issues or engaged with their children as active agents in establishing boundaries and practices, but the data provides a clear insight into these questions.

Five focus groups of between 4–6 participants were held with 27 participants. A schedule of questions based on the primary research questions guided the focus groups. Seven participants were asked to participate in follow-up interviews based on issues and key themes raised in the focus groups. A further 13 participants participated in interviews only. Interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. Twenty-nine participants were mothers, 10 were fathers, and one was a grandmother who was the primary carer of two boys. Most participants were aged in their mid-40s, with a median age of 46. Participants had 90 children in total: 49 of those were aged between 12 and 16 – the target age-range of study. Of these 49 children, 30 were female and 19 were male. The vast majority of participants were married (heterosexual), white, highly educated (60 per cent held post-graduate qualifications), and relatively wealthy (42 per cent had household incomes almost double the median household income for the area). Almost all participants were working professionals, representing mostly middle-class occupations such as academics, psychologists, and public servants. One participant was a stay-at-home parent.

The project’s conceptual framework takes a Foucauldian approach, drawing on his work on discourses and institutions. A discourse is ‘a group of statements’ (Foucault, 1989: 120); discourses function as ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them’ (Weedon, 1987: 108). Discourses are ‘part of a technique for the production of human subjects and institutions’ (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 38). Such an approach looks for the ways in which meaning is made through culture. The project also draws on Foucault’s (1981) poststructural approach to sexuality, which insists that ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ forms of sexuality are always constructed through culture, and are historically and culturally specific.

Transcripts from all focus groups and interviews totalled approximately 200,000 words.

Data was analysed using qualitative thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), which is a method for systematically identifying, organising and offering insight into patterns of meanings across a dataset. An inductive and reflexive form of thematic analysis was adopted meaning that various categories and themes were derived from the data and evolved during the data analysis process, which also informed subsequent interviews and focus groups. To determine the key themes, data was analysed at a latent, interpretative level, rather than purely a semantic one, looking beyond what participants explicitly said to glean insight into their underlying ideas, assumptions and conceptualizations (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Clusters of categories that were similar and overlapping were grouped together and described according to broader overarching themes. All names have been changed to maintain participants’ anonymity, and some quotes have been lightly edited. The study was approved by the university’s human research ethics committee.

Findings

‘Who knows what they see?’

Our first finding is that when parents did raise concerns about the digital sexual ecosystem (pornography and sexting) they consistently represented the behaviour of their children as unknown and unknowable. We note that in the interviews, most participants did not raise the issue explicitly when asked about what their main concerns were about their children’s digital practices. Instead, participants responded in the affirmative when asked if online pornography concerned them. Despite the prominence of risk narratives about pornography, participants appeared less concerned about the purported risk of access and exposure to pornography than they were about other issues such as their children’s time online. In relation to sexting, only two participants identified this as a major concern with respect to their 14 year-old daughters, with others indicating that they were only ‘a bit concerned’, that it ‘wasn’t an issue for them yet, but might be in a couple of years’, or that they did not think their children would ever do that (despite their children’s friends allegedly doing it). A minority of parents said that they were not at all concerned, and one father went so far as to explicitly dismiss media discourse as a ‘moral panic’. However, in terms of our interest in how young people’s engagement with the digital sexual ecosystem is talked about, we note that when participants did raise concerns it was in terms of the unknown. One mother, for example, explicitly acknowledged this: ‘Who knows what they see? You say that you don’t think your kid consumes pornography, but who knows?’ Another mother similarly noted that ‘I think once they’re in their room with a device, they’re watching it and you have no idea what they’re watching, they’re watching porn’. This establishes the basic framework for our findings: parents established their children’s engagement with the digital sexual ecosystem as unknown and unknowable. When parents in the sample did talk about engaging with their kids about digital sexual images, it was apparent that they were not asking their children for their thoughts on the matter, or listening to their concerns and needs. As one father said, ‘Obviously, I don’t check the big kids, but we do, I . . . part joke, but part to let him know that I’m aware, “Mate, stop staying up so late looking at porn”’.

This approach may seem like common sense in English-speaking cultures, however it is worth noting that this is a culturally specific approach to managing discussions about sex within families. For example, research has shown that young Dutch women are likely to seek advice from their parents before they first have sex (Brugman et al., 2010). An important outcome from this research is to insist that the approach illustrated by Australian parents – in common with other English-speaking countries – is not the only, nor necessarily the best one to managing discussions with young people about pornography.

‘Normal’ sexuality: dominant discourses about the digital sexual ecosystem

Our second finding demonstrates the ways in which parents’ concerns about their children’s engagement with the digital sexual ecosystem is not based on knowledge about what their children are doing, nor on conversations about online pornography with their children. Rather their concerns were very much framed through current dominant discourses of risk, fear and concern about how digital sexual images work, and based on a range of assumptions about the ‘horrific’ and ‘dreadful’ nature of contemporary internet pornography. Most parents, for example, framed their concerns about online pornography in terms of its potential to distort perceptions about ‘healthy’ relationships, sexual expectations and norms, a framing which echoes media and cyber safety discourse. A few parents did explicitly identify examples of problematic online pornography when articulating their concerns, including misogynistic and violent content; however, consistent with previous research, it was apparent that for most parents online pornography as harmful to young people was implicitly axiomatic.

As Byron et al have demonstrated, concerns about pornography presenting ‘unrealistic’ visions of sexuality are typically based on heteronormative ideals of how sexuality should work. When writers say that pornography presents an ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unhealthy’ vision of sexuality they typically refer to its representation of casual sex, polyamorous sex, kinky practices such as group sex or BDSM, or even anal sex or female sexual agency. These approaches insist that the only good version of sexuality is between monogamous couples engaged in long-term committed relationships in order to express their love for each other (Byron et al., 2021). This approach does not reflect many young people’s understanding of sexuality, which increasingly embraces queer gender and sexualities (Worthen, 2023). For example, one father said:

I know my son has watched some [pornography] stuff and I asked him not to watch it on his sister’s computer. I’m concerned about the impression that it creates of what’s normal and what’s expected in a relationship, but that’s cliché, everybody knows that.

Parents of boys and girls appeared equally concerned about pornography: parents of girls were concerned about what boys might expect of them sexually and how their daughters might navigate such tricky sexual situations (although few appeared concerned that their daughters might emulate sexual practices they see online), and parents of boys expressed concern that they would consider pornographic depictions of sexual activity as ‘normal’ practices that they were entitled to. A number of participants appeared to invoke many of these public scripts when discussing their concerns about pornography. As one mother said:

There’s a lot of people out there that think body hair is abnormal, because of what they see. And what respectful relationships, or even what sex is, because of what they see. They’ve been seeing a lot of porn, a lot of violent sex in some ways as well, so that’s concerning, this distorted message of what that is.

Parents explicitly draw on these dominant discourses of what counts as ‘reality’ or ‘normal’ sexuality. Said one father:

What you might see in those videos is very different to the reality of a loving and sexual relationship.

Said a mother:

What I’m worried about for our kids is that normal will become different. That the normal is going to be skewed. . . It’s very hard to transcend a culture in which you live. If the culture has moved in a slightly perverse way, you won’t even know it. You just operate with it.

Here she makes explicit that she wants her children to be sexually ‘normal’ and not ‘perverse’. These parents offer no evidence of talking to their children about contrasting beliefs of what is ‘normal’, ‘real’ or ‘healthy’ sexual practice. Walsh (2011) again points towards a more productive and open way of addressing this issue, proposing that open communication with children about sex should involve discussion about your sexual values (p. 12). Such an approach can be challenging for parents – it involves thinking about one’s own values, rather than appealing to a universal norm about, for example, whether sex outside of marriage is acceptable. Nevertheless, research in sex education suggests that having open conversations with young people – rather than ‘preaching’ to them (Buckingham and Bragg, 2004: 162) – has the most positive outcomes.

In a recent book aimed at parents, secondary school educator and expert in student wellbeing, Daisy Turnbull offers some excellent contemporary advice to parents on questions they should be asking their teenagers. In 50 Questions To Ask Your Teens she deals with concerns about pornography by explicitly avoiding a gendered or heteronormative framework. She writes of the question ‘What is your relationship with porn?’:

I thought long and hard about how to write this question, because porn impacts people in different ways. I also didn’t want to make it about gender. So instead I have structured it into two sections: the gazer and the gazed upon. Huzzah, that gender studies major paid off! (Turnbull, 2022: 160).

As someone who has worked closely with young women as a wellbeing advisor, Turnbull makes the important point that contemporary teenagers are learning about sexuality, in the first instance, largely through exposure to pornography. Her advice to parents is this: ‘There is nothing wrong with watching some porn, but it cannot be the standard all sex is set to. . . Talk about porn because it is definitely having an influence’ (Turnbull, 2022: 165). Excellent advice according to our research.

‘The temptation to take explicit selfies’ – porn and gender

Our third finding is that in the dominant discourses about ‘normal’ sexuality on which parents drew are profoundly gendered. This was particularly the case in their discussion of sexting. As Albury (2017) have pointed out, moral panics about sexting tend to work with an idealised view that young women have – or should have–no interest in sexual self-representation:

this mode of discourse tends to frame the ‘sexting teen’ (most often presumed to be a heterosexual woman) as lacking agency or sexual rights while bearing individual responsibility for the public exposure (or ‘consequences’) of sexual self-representation (pp. 713–714)

When participants discussed sexting they tended to employ a gendered model of healthy sexuality in which women should not be interested in sexual self-representation – and where evidence of such interest can only be explained in terms of being ‘tempted’ by men.

Again, we found no evidence that these parents had listened to their children about this issue. Rather, parents appeared to draw on dominant discourses which circulate not only in relation to sexting, but also pornography, about the broader ‘sexualisation’ or ‘pornification’ of culture creating a ‘new normal’ in which practices of sexting become commonplace and even expected – worries about ‘compulsory sexual agency’ (Gill, 2008) on the part of girls. One father framed his concerns as follows:

The thing that I’m most nervous about is the extent to which young women in particular as they get into that age of sexual interest, which is about 13-14 predictably, it comes on slowly, but they get to the point where there [is the] temptation to take explicit selfies . . . That really makes me nervous because that puts them in a whole different place. As we now know, those things never really go away.

He added that the issue of sexting was, according to the school, a significant problem (he described it as ‘their number one concern’) which contributed to his concern.

A mother expressed her concerns less in terms of sexual agency, but in terms of pressure from peers within a sexualised culture in which explicit images come to be normal and expected. But it was evident that these concerns were influenced by external risk discourses as well as knowledge about her step-daughter’s peers.

I’m worried about them thinking that this is how we conduct relationships. She’s 14, and she’s at school with 15 year-olds because she’s just started the year. Little girls, 15 year-olds sending nude photos in her year. Sent to 17 year-olds in the school. . . I worry about consent. And the pressure of boys . . . You can get this pressure to share images of herself when I don’t think they’re old enough to know the purpose of it . . . I’ve read somewhere something saying this is how relationships might occur now. Yeah, that’s what I worry about.

One participant drew on her knowledge as a teacher when discussing her experiences with sexting in the school environment. Her direct experiences clearly shaped her views about the issue, although she admitted to not ‘having any concerns’ about her own daughters due to it being a ‘topic of discussion in our house for some time’. She said that sexting was ‘very common’, and often resulted in ‘terrible’ consequences for the girls involved:

I’ve had girls that haven’t even had a boyfriend send full frontal nudes to boys just because they’ve been asked to. . . They want validation by the boys. They want the boy to like them. The boys ask them for it, and . . .. Self-esteem. I always see it as the girls that aren’t comfortable with the way they look, they’re not comfortable in themselves, seem to be the ones who do it.

Conceptions of the motivations for teen sexting among participants were varied and at times contradictory. In some accounts, like the one above, views about those who were most at risk of sexting appeared to reflect mainstream media discourses around sexting, which typically frame girls as victims, and ‘at risk’, corruptible, lacking self-respect, self-control, or self-esteem, and pressured by boys into engaging in the practice. Another view was that engaging in practices of sexualised self-representation demonstrated sexual potency and agency and carried with it a degree of credibility and cultural capital. A female participant recounted the following:

I talked to someone else who apparently talked to one of the young girls involved, and she was shocked because apparently this particular young girl [who had engaged in practices of sexualised self-representation] was not that embarrassed. Then we laughed and we said, if you’re a true celebrity, you have a sex tape and it’s been ‘leaked’. Then, it adds to your infamy. It makes you even more cool, so that’s interesting, huh?

Despite most parents reproducing dominant gendered discourses around sexting which typically shame female practices of sexualised self-representation, many parents acknowledged and were critical of the gendered double standards that exist. A female participant drew on external knowledges to critique the gendered double standards and cultures of victim blaming that exist in relation to the practice and expressed concern about the implications of this for her daughters.

I was reading an article about young people, and these young women, the girl–it doesn’t matter if he took it [an explicit image] secretly and she didn’t give agreement, she didn’t give him consent to do that. She’s a slut, she’s a whore. She’s bad, and he, well you shouldn’t have done that. He’ll get a slap on the wrist. Doesn’t matter what it is. The girl is always looked down upon. . . That’s what happens, and I worry about my daughters.

Despite these varied views about the practice, and the general low level of concern, none of the participants (with perhaps the exception of one), suggested that sexting was an unproblematic, healthy mode of agentic sexual self-expression. Most parents drew on external risk discourses and public scripts to indicate that they considered it to be a risky behaviour with potentially serious consequences, although the perceived consequences clearly differed depending on the gender of the child, with girls suffering reputational damage, and boys potentially facing a criminal record. Said one female participant:

I’ll say upfront, I work as a police officer. And I have seen exactly what happens with that one and we cannot get it back for your children. Those photos are gone. I don’t think children – because they are, my son’s 13 but he’s a child, and they don’t understand, that what I’ve said is that what you put up is there forever.

These accounts fit perfectly within dominant discourses that verge on victim-blaming, and seem almost to criminalise sexual self-representation (Albury and Crawford, 2012).

What age should families be talking about sex?

Our fourth finding might be our most important, as it deeply informs our other findings. The question implicit in our findings is simply this: Why are parents not openly discussing sex and pornography with their children in a way which elicits their perspectives, practices and views?

As we have noted, there are many potential reasons. There is a persistent mainstream media and social media discourse about childhood ‘innocence’. Sex education has long been controversial in the Western world, particularly with conservative activists who have long argued that children should be kept ignorant about sex (Zimmerman, 2015). In recent years, these attacks on sex education have taken on a radical new character with activists arguing that informing young people about sex is a form of sexual ‘grooming’ (Fonte and Carey, 2022). As recently as 2023 a book titled ‘Welcome to Sex: Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out’ which claimed to be ‘educational, age-appropriate and inclusive’ attracted significant controversy, with some critics arguing that the book ‘is a graphic sex guide that’s ‘teaching sex’ to young children’ (Whatman, 2023).

In this context it is unsurprising that some parents are wary of talking to their children about sex – particularly at a young age. Research commonly finds that parents, teachers and other stakeholders want to hold back on providing information about sex to young people until they have passed puberty, or even the age of consent (McKee et al., 2018) when, as noted above, research shows that age-appropriate comprehensive information about sex is vital for young people throughout their development. Our findings provide evidence of parents falling into this trap when talking about pornography – leaving discussions about online pornography too late, in some cases when their children were already teenagers and likely to have already encountered pornography. For example, when asked about whether she talked to her sons about pornography a mother of three boys aged 12, 15 and 17 said she had only broached the issue with the 17 year-old because ‘he’s very open and likes to discuss things’. Yet, when asked if she had discussed it with one of her younger sons she said:

I have a little, and he doesn’t know anything and doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s like ‘mum, why are you so embarrassing? This is why I don’t talk to you because you just say these ridiculous things!’

Another mother of a 13 year-old boy was adamant that her son was not interested in looking at pornography. When asked if she would have pre-emptive discussions about pornography with her 13 year-old son, she stated:

I think if it becomes an issue we’ll talk to him about it. But I’ve always thought that if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. So if it emerges as an issue then we’ll deal with it, but to bring it up might just invite him to think about stuff that he hasn’t thought about and right now he just doesn’t care.

Parental accounts suggest that parents also drew on dominant discourses of childhood ‘innocence’, long after their children had passed puberty. It has long been recognised that parents often want to keep their children ignorant about sex for as long as possible, under the rubric of ‘innocence’ (Angelides, 2019). This can result in parents wanting to hold back sex education until it’s too late for young people, who have already had to work things out for themselves (McKee et al., 2018). This approach again refuses to listen to young people about their needs, but rather constructs them as objects of concern to be managed. As Turnbull (2022) writes in her advice to parents about talking to teens: ‘As soon as a teenager feels you are judging them, they will shut down. This book is not about eliminating all judgement, but it is about eliminating judgement when you ask a question’ (p. 17).

A majority of parents did claim to be discussing online risks and pornography with their children as their main strategy for addressing their own concerns about pornography. However, this talk does not appear to be an open dialogue with their children. Instead, the conversations parents indicated they were engaging in appeared to be more about ‘educating’ their children about online dangers in ways which reflect dominant risk discourse, and imparting key messages – or ‘preaching’ to children (Buckingham and Bragg, 2004)–rather than talking to their children to understand their perspectives and practices. Some examples from participants:

‘We’ve had lots of conversations with our son over the years about things like respecting women and . . . about pornography too, and how it’s not real. . . It’s all make believe’.

‘I’ve talked to him about that there’s no limit to what’s on the internet, but you need to restrain yourself and you should wait until you’re an adult’.

‘We talk about it a lot and . . . I’ve done what I can to teach them what’s right and wrong’.

‘You’ve got to have that discussion. . . And sometimes it gets down to ‘because I’m the mum’ but usually we get there’.

‘We do try to talk to them about the fact that if you put something out there, it’s out there for everyone, and you shouldn’t put anything on there that you don’t want your grandmother to read’.

Conclusion

Researchers have consistently shown that young people talk about the digital sexual ecosystem of reading and writing sexual practices and identities using language and typologies that are quite different from those used in public discussions about these issues. In this analysis we demonstrate that parents are relying on the frameworks of public discussion and discourses of risk in order to make sense of their children’s engagement with the digital sexual ecosystem and to broach the issue with their children. However, as the literature shows, young people have more complex and nuanced perceptions of the digital sexual ecosystem, which is at odds with parental and mainstream framings of the issue (eSafety Research, 2023; Spišák, 2016). Open discussion between parents and their children is necessary to help bridge this divide. This entails more than simply ‘talking to’ young people about online pornography and the perceived harms which many parents in this study purported to do. Rather, it involves dialogue which invites young people to share their perceptions, questions and experiences, and requires parents to actively listen to these accounts. There is no evidence of this kind of dialogue and listening in the parental accounts presented above, which as a result reflect a general lack of knowledge about what their children are doing online.

This is not surprising. The findings we have presented in this paper are consistent with many other studies which highlight that despite parental assertions that trust and dialogue are their primary strategy for managing their concerns, these discussions are rare. We also acknowledge that in other cultures open communication about sex is more common than in Australia (Brugman et al., 2010), and that dominant discourses about online pornography in Australia foreground a litany of risks and harms. It is not the aim of this paper to criticise or shame the Australian parents who participated in this study, who evidently have their children’s best interests at heart. Indeed, the vast majority of parents in this study appeared deeply invested in their children’s wellbeing and committed to talking with and educating their children to help them navigate online spaces.

Nevertheless, the data presented in this study do have important implications for policy settings about the digital sexual ecosystem. We hear coming through the data time and again parents projecting, conjecturing and fantasising about what their children might be doing, seeing or thinking, and ‘educating’ their children about the unrealistic and harmful nature of online pornography, but not that they are asking their children about their online activities, and listening to their children about these issues. Young people themselves have expressed a desire for more of these conversations with their parents, but noted that their parents are ill-equipped to deal with such concerns (eSafety Research, 2023). In Australia, as in many other countries, the dominant mode for policy engagement on these issues has been to chase an impossible dream of making sure that young people do not encounter any online representations of sexuality (Taylor, 2023). The data presented in this paper provides empirical weight to the suggestions by young people that education about online pornography be extended to parents and carers so that they are better able to support young people and openly discuss online pornography with their children (Davis et al., 2021; eSafety Research, 2023; Rothman et al., 2017; Zurcher, 2017). This paper contributes to this body of literature in highlighting the importance of pursuing policy settings and devoting resources to programmes focused on supporting parents to become more comfortable talking to their children, listening to their perspectives, and having open communication about sex (Schuster et al., 2008).