How porn has taken over the classroom

Two decades on from the explosion of free, on-demand online porn, we are beginning to have a much clearer picture of the effects on the first generation to grow up with it.

It is not merely sexualising children, but radically altering their conception of what constitutes healthy relationships. Recent research from the Children’s Commissioner makes this clear: just under half of young people (of both sexes) think girls expect sex to involve physical aggression; a further 42 per cent say girls enjoy physically aggressive sex acts.

Indeed, it is widely recognised today that the pornography epidemic is a catastrophe for children and young people. It is warping their highly plastic brains, normalising brutal sexual behaviour and embedding misogynistic attitudes at an age when they’re not even old enough to have sex.

Less recognised is the extent to which all this has actually been made worse by schools. This will likely come as a surprise to many. Given schools’ intense focus on countering extremism (including misogyny) in the classroom, you’d think teaching healthy attitudes to sex and warning about the dangers of pornography would be a major feature of the relationship, sex and health education (RSHE) curriculum. But you’d be wrong. The classroom is, in fact, the battleground chosen by the pro-porn lobby for a stunningly successful counteroffensive of its own.

To a frazzled, overworked teacher, online resource libraries are a godsend. Instead of researching and creating teaching materials from scratch, they simply visit an officially sanctioned third-party website and download everything they need, from factsheets to classroom games to full lesson plans. Need an age-appropriate resource for teaching sex to 11-year-olds? There’s an app for that.

The problem is, no one’s checking whether these resources are in fact appropriate at all. In 2023, The Times reported that one of the biggest providers of school lesson plans, Tes (formerly Times Educational Supplement), was selling resources for children as young as 11 that described activities including anal sex, pornography and sending nude selfies and dick pics.

Tes is not an outlier. Sex education in the UK has been described by campaigners as a ‘Wild West’ where any group – including pro-porn campaigners – can submit resources and lesson plans with little to no vetting.

That’s hardly surprising given that, until recently, the RSHE curriculum was non-statutory; unlike subjects like maths or physics, there was no government-mandated syllabus that schools had to cover. The introduction of government guidance in September 2020 has yet to provide anything like a clear and uniform framework for teaching sex education.

In 2021, a year after the roll-out of the new guidance, the then minister for school standards, Robin Walker, admitted that only a fifth of UK primary and secondary schools had received training on how to teach RSHE. Twelve months later, a joint survey from teaching union NASUWT and the UK’s child-safety charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), found that almost half of secondary-school teachers do not feel confident teaching about sex and relationships, while a whopping 86 per cent said they need more resources and training.

The lack of oversight and guidance has provided fertile ground for a flourishing cottage industry of third-party organisations (3POs) providing RSHE lesson plans and other classroom resources to schools. Many of these 3POs have been in business for years, thriving wherever there’s no formal regulatory body monitoring the legality, approach or suitability of sex-ed materials.

In the UK, their influence on the curriculum was only revealed in a 2023 report commissioned by then MP Miriam Cates, entitled What is being taught in relationships and sex education in our schools?. This listed a range of providers and resources that either minimise pornography’s harms or openly celebrate it.

While these 3POs pay lip service to the government’s stated aims of reducing online harms, the report notes that they demonstrate an ideological opinion ‘that there is nothing inherently wrong with young people seeing pornography’.

One of the most prominent examples was a resource from RSHE provider Split Banana, titled ‘A simple guide to great sex-ed: how to talk about porn’. The advice stated:

‘It’s not a bad thing in itself to watch [porn], and it’s important to remove shame and stigma in order to have good conversations around it. It’s also good to emphasise the importance of paying for porn. This underlines that [acting in pornography] is a job, that people should always be paid for their labour and that sex workers should be respected. There is also a lot of great feminist porn.’

While this content has since been amended, at the time of writing Split Banana continues to promote the message that ‘not all porn is bad in itself’. Apparently, all that is needed to inoculate young people from ‘problematic narratives’ within pornography is having the ‘right conversations’.

The Let’s Talk About Porn programme from South West Grid for Learning (SWGL) provides another egregious example. In a slideshow for classrooms, and on the very first page, it states: ‘Porn is often portrayed as something that is BAD or DAMAGING [capitals in original] especially for children, when in actual fact we DON’T KNOW what the effects are as there is not enough evidence.’

The resource is big on the porn industry’s ‘positive’, ‘feminist’ achievements, celebrating milestones such as Playboy’s first female photographer, but makes no mention of violence or abuse within pornography, other than one slide on what constitutes illegal content. Where it does mention harms, it is to minimise or deny them. On the issue of desensitisation, whereby porn users become less interested in real-life intimacy and thirst after ever more extreme pornographic stimuli, SWGL uses the analogy of cake: porn is something to be enjoyed as a ‘treat’, and that can be ‘part of a healthy relationship with sex’.

The rise of unaccountable, uncredentialled, porn-linked third-party RSHE providers mirrors that seen in other areas of the curriculum, where assorted providers have promoted critical race theory. Yet established, once-reputable organisations are also parroting the pro-porn line, including those set up explicitly to promote child safeguarding.

ChildLine, the advice line for young people run by the NSPCC, published a YouTube video telling children ‘porn is fun to watch’ and ‘sexy to enjoy’. It directed young viewers to a list of categories – including BDSM and hardcore – they might choose to look up. Throughout, the video employed what UK child safety advocates Safe Schools Alliance (SSA) described as a ‘jokey and flippant’ tone; for example, by noting that porn is aimed at over-18s before adding, ‘You are over 18, aren’t you? [wink]’. Between 6 April 2015 and 6 April 2021, this video amassed 3,181,991 views, and was only removed following a campaign and petition by SSA.

The fact that this video existed at all, the fact that at no point during production did wiser heads prevail, illustrates the almost total absence of critical thinking when it comes to protecting children from pornography. As SSA points out, the video is even more puzzling in the light of a statement from Dame Esther Rantzen, director of ChildLine, a mere six days before this video was first posted. She said that children ‘are telling us very clearly that [porn] is having a damaging and upsetting effect on them’.

Given the extraordinary power and influence pornography wields in so many areas of society, there’s a grim logic to porn-linked organisations’ infiltration of schools and the curriculum. The fact that these same pro-pornography messages are being promoted by established children’s safeguarding charities shows that the sexualisation of schoolchildren isn’t just a problem with individual schools or activist teachers. It also shows that pro-porn sentiment is embedded deep within our national educational culture.

There is no reason why the nature and scale of this problem should not be known by every teacher, parent, safeguarding lead, headteacher or other caregiver. Yet as with other areas of pornography’s influence explored in our new book, Pornocracy, we seem to be in denial when it comes to children’s access to sexual material. Why is this not treated as a public-health crisis, one of historic proportions and with the most profound consequences for the future?

There are no simple answers, but we suggest that one of the biggest factors is a conspiracy of silence within the education system. Let’s be clear: we are not talking about teachers and school leaders colluding to expose children to pornography or ‘indoctrinate’ them with pro-porn messages. Most teachers struggle to do their best with the guidance and materials available to them; in fact, it’s here the problem lies.

We’ve examined the influence of third-party organisations (many with direct links to the pornography industry) that promote porn and minimise its risks. There’s a bigger issue here than these unaccountable providers, however, and it’s not confined to the UK. Many of the organisations pushing pro-pornography teaching resources are linked to, or informed by, sex-education guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), which both embrace a ‘sex-positive’ approach to education.

Sex positivity sounds benign – healthy, even. And it can be, when it means a more liberal, accepting understanding of human sexuality than stifling, Victorian-vintage sexual moralism. Yet the strain of ‘sex positivity’ adopted by the WHO and UNESCO takes the far broader and much more common interpretation, which is that any human sexual behaviour is ‘valid’. This includes everything from kinks and paraphilias to illegal and abusive activities like prostitution, paedophilia and pornography.

The approaches of both WHO and UNESCO are also closely aligned with so-called queer theory, an academic approach that seeks to challenge, subvert or erase traditional boundaries – particularly those relating to sexuality, and those between adults and children.

The guiding hand of queer theory can be seen throughout , especially in their liberal application of the word ‘sexuality’ to children. Take this example from the UNESCO website: ‘Young people are sexual beings. All young people should be able to explore, experience and express their sexualities in healthy, positive, pleasurable and safe ways.’ The WHO website, meanwhile, confidently states: ‘From birth [all children] are engaging in sexuality education.’

It would be somewhat overwrought to argue that these groups are advocating child abuse. What’s undeniable, however, is that their queer theory-inspired language is more than a little creepy.

The WHO and UNESCO standards are the vector for queer theory to escape the confines of academia and infect the school curriculum. A 2024 Civitas report, Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation?, noted that the UK’s new RSHE guidance was heavily influenced by organisations such as the WHO and UNESCO, which promote a shift from sex to sexuality education.

These international NGOs may not directly advocate pornography for children, but they don’t need to: their adherence to queer theory and the sex-positive approach provide both legitimacy and a framework for educational authorities and 3POs to create highly sexualised and inappropriate lessons.

Maybe this wouldn’t matter so much if these concepts and materials were well known to parents and, indeed, to the rest of the public. All too often – almost always, in fact – they are kept deliberately secret. In the UK, this was highlighted by Labour MP Rosie Duffield in a House of Commons debate in June 2022, when she informed the education secretary that headteachers were forbidden by 3POs from sharing materials with parents on the grounds they are ‘commercially sensitive’. As Joanna Williams, the academic and author of the Civitas report, drily observed, keeping secrets was once considered a safeguarding red flag; now it’s all the rage.

The most dangerous secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves. For decades, our society has refused to acknowledge the obvious dangers of children’s easy access to increasingly extreme pornography. For some people, perhaps, it was because admitting it would force them to confront the evil of their own habit. Whatever the reason, a generation of young people have become ensnared by porn, yet this crisis goes almost unremarked upon by politicians, parents or the public at large. The painful truth is that the pornocracy has succeeded for the same reason that so many child abusers get away with it for so long: because enough people in power have decided to turn a blind eye. It’s time we made them look this social disaster firmly in the face.

This is an edited extract from Pornocracy, by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel, published by Polity. Order it here.