An earlier study by CBS News claimed that 90 percent of children between the ages of eight and 16 had viewed hardcore material online at least once. According to the study, most inadvertently stumble across porn while using search engines to do homework.
Conservative groups such as Family Safe Media have frequently pointed to such statistics to bolster arguments for Internet censorship, adding their own unsubstantiated claims, such as that that teens aged 12 to 17 are the largest consumers of online adult material.
While interest groups may twist the numbers to suit their needs, no one is disputing that the Internet provides young people with unprecedented access to explicit content.
“Before the days of the Internet, kids would sneak a peek at Playboy,” said Paul Roy, dean at the Palo Alto Institute of Psychology. “Internet porn… gives people access in a way they’ve never had.”
Amanda Lenhart, a research specialist at Pew and principle author of the study, said that children are sometimes drawn in by the forbidden aspect of viewing adult material online.
“The age-old struggle between parents who want to protect their children and teens who want to assert their independence and venture into forbidden realms is playing out in new ways online,” Lenhart said. “No matter how hard parents try, online teens are going to do things they know their parents won’t like.”
On the other hand, there may be a disparity between how hard parent say they are trying to keep an eye on their children and how hard they actually do try. For example, nearly two-thirds of parents in the Pew study said they check the sites their children visit, but only one third of children surveyed said their parents actually checked up on them.
The Pew study is based on random telephone calls with 1,100 children 12 to 17 years old and their parents. The main findings have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
