Workshop to highlight youth porn problems

Community education project Reality & Risk: Pornography, young people and sexuality coordinator Maree Crabbe will be running a workshop in Napier tomorrow. Photo/Supplied

A workshop in Napier will highlight issues with young people's access to modern pornography and how to address it.

Sex Ed By Porn? will be run by Australian Maree Crabbe, who co-ordinates a community education project, Reality & Risk: Pornography, young people and sexuality. It will be held at Napier Boys' High School today.

The workshop is aimed at anyone who works with young people to help develop their understanding on how pornography is influencing young people's sexual experience and behaviour.

Ms Crabbe said she would be talking about how young people are exposed to high rates of easily accessible pornography that is very different to what many adults realise.

Most of the pornography has high levels of aggression in it, particularly against women, which is impacting young people's sexual expectations and experiences, she said.

There are growing numbers of people aware of this issue but many feel out of their depth as to how to deal with it.

"Over the past decade or so, pornography has become both more mainstream and more hardcore.

"For young people growing up in this era of ever-new and accessible technology, it is almost impossible to avoid exposure to pornography.

"The classroom or parent talk is now no match for porn - with its endless array of gyrating bodies, offering a quick, easy and anonymous sexual charge."

The workshop will help give people the tools to address the aggressive messages conveyed to young people through modern pornography.

"One of the most concerning elements is pornography's relationship with violence against women."

Ms Crabbe lives in Australia and is co-producer and co-director of the documentary films Love and Sex in an Age of Pornography and The Porn Factor and author of In The Picture - a whole school resource to assist secondary schools to address the influence of explicit sexual imagery.

She has developed and delivered programs focusing on sexual violence prevention, sexual diversity and prevention of sexually transmissible infections.

She has held workshops in New Zealand before but never in Hawke's Bay.

Ms Crabbe is spending the week conducting her seminars in Masterton, Hawke's Bay and Auckland as well as taking part in a Putting Porn in Focus conference in Wellington.