In a survey, 52% of parents say they do not always monitor their children on the net. Some are accidentally exposed to pornography, alerts an association.
While the children in zone C (Créteil, Montpellier, Paris, etc.) have started their winter school holidays last Saturday, it is an important warning that the association formulated andannouncement on Tuesday.
Created to protect the youngest from the risks of exposure to online pornography, the association took advantage of this period when many children are on their own to once again alert parents to the dangers of the web. .
Indeed, according to a recent survey (1) conducted for the association by Opinionway, 81% of children go online daily, including 69% to watch films and videos. “And the holidays are a good time to watch films or cartoons”, rightly worries Héléna Walther, president of the association, in a press release.
Talking about the dangers of the web
A justified fear because a child is, on average, 11 years old when he is first exposed to pornographic content online, “often accidentally, via pop-up windows, by consulting illegal streaming sites and live streaming a priori “harmless””, specifies the association.
Accidental viewings far from rare, since 14% of 9-16 year olds have suffered them. Worse still, they are 36% among 15-16 year olds. And these unexpected events are not without consequences on their mental health: “More than 74% of them say they had a bad experience”.
For this reason, the association wishes to warn about the preventive role that parents can play. 52% of them agree that they do not always, if ever, supervise their children when they watch videos on the internet.
“Holidays are a great time to step up surveillance and talk to them about the dangers of the internet,” recommends innocence.
In a recent report, the association ennocence recalls that “the impact of pornography on children can be analogous to sexual abuse”. This was indeed the conclusion of another report on the media environment of young people by the Interassociative Childhood Media Collective, commissioned in March 2002 by Ségolène Royal.
Inside, it was written that “this confrontation is a real shock and the vision of the sexuality of these children risks being perverted in the long term (sexual denaturation, violence, image of the degraded and contemptuous woman, logic of performance, incitement to rape or even zoophilia or incest).
(1) The study was carried out with a sample of 2,273 people, representative of the French population aged 18 and over, within which a sample of 653 parents of children under 18 were interviewed. . The interviews were conducted from December 1 to 3, 2015.
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