Sam was 14 when he stumbled across pornography while looking for Pokémon on his Nintendo DS. “I chatted to people while playing video games and connected with others who were interested in the same porn,” he recalls.
“We would all share links. The scary thing is you didn’t know how old anyone really was. I made one friend and it turned out later that we were both lying, pretending to be 18.”
Sam moved on to Google images, by now searching for specific pornography. “There were no age warnings or they were easy to ignore. I started setting up ‘alt’ accounts on social media accounts just to look for porn.”
Within a short time he began to feel his porn habit was out of control. “I had to watch it every morning and evening for the whole of my teenage years.”
Sam is now 20 and at university and feels he is starting to recover. “I have a boyfriend. I’m managing to move away from living in that world. It’s not right that I saw so much. Some of what I saw was illegal,” he said.
He is one of scores of young adults who responded to a Guardian callout asking people how they felt they had been affected by seeing online porn as a child.
A report from the children’s commissioner last month found the average age that children see porn is 13, but nearly a third have seen it by 11. One in 10 have seen it bythe time they are nine. A survey out on Friday shows significant numbers of children feel their viewing of porn is either habitual or addictive. This finding was echoed in the replies to the callout.
Marina, 26, was one of several respondents who said she felt damaged by a teenage addiction to violent pornography. “We are a tester generation for this material. I was at primary school when I saw it. By 12 or 13 I was searching for it and soon it became very extreme material showing violence against women. This is baked into the system. You will soon not be satisfied with normal sex.
“I justified it by thinking that because these sites were big names, surely some moderator checked if it was consensual. But I knew deep down some of it wasn’t right. I will be honest as this is for the purposes of journalism – I think at some point while watching porn you stop caring. It stole a piece of my soul.”
“I feel damaged by what I saw, 100%. I really feel very strongly about this and I have talked to other women who share this feeling. We feel something was broken inside of us, that we were not given the chance to experience sex without the corruption that comes from this material.”
Several people described the intense shock of first seeing porn. Chris, 26, said: “A friend showed me after school one day. It was violent and degrading, I felt sick. But I was glued to it, determined to fit in with my peers. I began to seek out similar videos, BDSM, where pain was being inflicted. I lost interest in other activities, I didn’t play football or go out. I just wanted to stay home and watch porn.”
A 36-year-old who said porn became easier to find online as he was in his mid-teens said: “At around 14 I saw porn that was so hardcore I cried after seeing it. But within a year or so I was actively collecting the same material on a hard drive. Porn has had a profound effect on my life. I was addicted to very extreme and in some cases illegal content, looking at it two or three times a day throughout my 20s and early 30s. About 18 months ago, my wife caught me and finally I had to seek help.”
Sonya, 20, was one of many young women who got in touch with the Guardian to say their sex lives had been affected by the porn they saw at a young age. “I was actively searching by 14, looking mainly on Twitter and Pornhub,” she said.
“Me and my friends were expected to perform more extreme acts. We would wake up covered in bruises or have boys expect us immediately to have anal sex. I am having a lot of conversations now with people my age about how harmful porn was.”
But some who responded raised concerns that describing porn as “extreme” is dangerous moralising. Jamie teaches sex education in an all-girls school. He said: “Porn doesn’t change people’s sexual behaviour in a vacuum. If a young man has been socialised into a misogynistic worldview then porn may shape it further. But I don’t agree that someone who understands consent and respect will be harmed by the porn they see.
“I view BDSM, which some see as extreme, and it has done no harm to me. It is also very popular. It doesn’t imply a real-life desire to hurt people.
“I’ve read research and found no robust evidence that porn causes harm. People who feel harmed by watching porn may be suffering because of their internalised shame. The solution is not abstinence, it is robust comprehensive sex education.”
* All names have been changed
