More teens exposed to X-rated Web sites - Survey

Teen exposure to online pornography is steadily increasing in United States, according to a study by the University of New Hampshire published in the Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, due out Monday.

The team of Chicago researchers said more children and adolescents are being exposed to online pornography, most of them, however, by accidentally viewing sexually explicit Web sites while surfing the Internet.

About four in every ten U.S. youngsters reported they've seen pornography while on the Internet, whereas two-thirds of them saying it was uninvited. The researchers reached their conclusion by going through a telephone survey of 1500 Internet users between the ages of 10 to 17 years conducted in 2005.

In all forty-two percent of netizens surveyed confessed that they had seen online pornography in the last year. Of that group, 66 percent said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out, the researchers found.

Thirty four percent said they had unwanted exposure to online pornography. The figure is up from 25 percent in a similar survey conducted in 1999 and 2000, raising concerns among child safety organizations.

The netizens who accidentally exposed to the porn sites said they were not trying to search for the material but encountered with the stuff sometimes likely because of misspelled Web addresses, pop-up advertisements or spam e-mails.

"Although there is evidence that most youth are not particularly upset when they encounter unwanted pornography on the Internet (it) could have a greater impact on some youth than voluntary encounters with pornography," the study said.

"Some youth may be psychologically and developmentally unprepared for unwanted exposure, and online images may be more graphic and extreme than pornography available from other sources," it added.

Psychiatrists fear exposure to online pornography could lead kids to become sexually active too soon or put them at risk of being victimized by sexual predators. Filtering and blocking software, though, helped prevent exposure but was not 100 percent effective, the researchers said.

"They're seeing things that they're really not emotionally prepared to see yet, which can cause trauma to them," Sharon Hirsch, a psychiatrist at University of Chicago, said.

The report says that most of the encounter with online pornography, both sought-out and accidental, were related to use of file-sharing programs to download images.

The group which said they sought out pornography were more likely to be teenager boys who used file-sharing programs to download images, talked online to strangers about sex, used the Internet at friends' homes, or possibly suffered from depression.

In their study, researchers defined the online pornography as pictures of naked people posing in a provocative manner or people having sex.

Online pornography is now an extremely large and profitable online industry, generating earnings of more than $12 billion. One out of every 8 Internet websites is pertaining to pornography, and there are over 400 million web pages featuring pornographic content on the net. The number of online porn sites, over the last eight years, has increased 30-fold.