How video content can help prevent the ‘birds and the bees’ bringing you to your knees

by Edwina Baden-Powell, Head of Production – ClickView Australia

The rapid advance of the internet has brought with it near-ubiquitous access to pornography, including by those under the age of 18. No matter how hard parents and schools try to police it, there’s no getting away from the fact that kids are stumbling onto pornography online. In fact, a staggering 70% of children aged 7-18 years old have accidentally encountered pornographic material online, often through a web search while doing homework.

Pre-COVID-19, studies showed that one in four young people had seen porn by the age of 12, and more than half by the age of 14. That is a large number of children being exposed to misleading content that often by-passes any home-truths about relationships and sex.

We would be naive to think that any leading source of pornography has an accurate gauge on the age of those visiting their sites, or that they have any real way of policing it. It would also be naive to think that viewers are all adults, or of consenting age.

According to Catherine Manning, CEO and program director of SEED Workshops: “In the early days of the internet, the ‘expert advice’ was for parents to install a filter, and keep children’s devices in the lounge room where parents could peer over their shoulder.

“Unsurprisingly, and particularly since the proliferation of smart devices, that advice has proven useless, with it becoming increasingly evident that education is the only viable approach to tackling negative effects of (near-inevitable) exposure to pornography.”

But while there are good reasons to be concerned about the impact this may be having on the development of young people’s sexual attitudes and self-image, sex-positive discussion remains the best remedy.

How online video resources can help

Thankfully, parents don’t have to tackle this huge subject alone. There is a whole world of online sex education content out there, along with tools and resources to make the whole conversation run a lot more smoothly.

Online video content is a great example of distancing, which can be used to make ‘the birds and the bees’ discussion easier, especially when it comes to complex subjects such as pornography and consent. Distancing helps people work through their issues by taking a step back and reflect on things at a distance.

Watching a video is a simple form of distancing. Video content helps by giving adults multiple in-points to the content, and provides kids with multiple ways of connecting with the scenes and characters.

This YouTube video, for example, uses making someone a cup of tea as a metaphor for consent. It’s a simple metaphor that helps simplify the idea of sexual consent: an important concept for any young person to understand, and one that ties in closely with many issues that arise around pornography.

Another great example comes from the New Zealand government, which recently launched a campaign promoting online safety for under 18s. Two adult actors knock on the door of a family home, and tell a stunned mother that her son has been ‘watching them online’. A conversation about consent and relationships ensues.

An example of similar content designed for a classroom context is ClickView’s free video series Behind the Scenes of Respectful Intimate Relationships, which is designed to help de-code mixed messaging around ‘pornography’ for older teenagers, and to help educate them that pornography is not a healthy or realistic approach to relationships or sex.

With our series, we used a further distancing technique by presenting the content in several layers: a pirate film, a film set shooting the pirate film, and expert commentators, discussing all the above. We used humor and bizarre situations as a distancing technique to help viewers feel comfortable watching and discussing the content.

Children don’t need to talk about their own experiences, or even the experiences of the ‘film crew’, but can step back one further and talk about the metaphorical situations the pirates find themselves in.

Pornography, consent, and relationships are often challenging topics for parents to tackle, but with the right tools and content in your arsenal, there’s a much greater chance of the whole thing running a lot more smoothly. With an entire generation growing up attached to their devices, it’s more important than ever before that we pass the right messages on to our kids.

ClickView is a leading video content provider for primary, secondary and higher education, offering visually stunning, curriculum-aligned video content and teacher resources.

ClickView has been producing and distributing its innovative, visionary video content online since it was launched by founders Evan Clark, Tim Power (the founder of Mathletics and Inquisitive), and Matthew Sandblom (Founder of Blake Education and Reading Eggs) back in 2003 – long before the days of YouTube and Netflix.

With offices across Australia and The United Kingdom, ClickView’s curriculum-based video content is trusted by 4,500+ schools, colleges and universities around the world.