SURREY, ENGLAND — A recent survey of British teens has determined the kids may not be all right: Children between the ages of 13 and 16 reported spending at least 100 minutes weekly browsing online porn.That’s roughly 87 hours or three and one-half days annually. (The statistic doesn’t seem quite as enormous when couched in those terms.)
The porn-surfing minutes represent only a fraction of the 31 hours British teens spend online each week, though — and who knows what activities occupy the rest of that time? One in three of the teens who participated in the survey admitted to hiding their online activities from parents and other adults.
But they did tell online survey firm OnePoll.com what they’re doing. The group of 1,000 volunteers reported spending another 100 minutes weekly downloading music, 210 minutes in Web-based chat, another 210 minutes on YouTube and similar sites, slightly more than 180 minutes researching homework online and 95 minutes looking for diet and weight-loss tips.
Family planning and pregnancy information searches occupied 90 minutes of survey respondents’ time weekly. Cosmetic surgery like collagen implants and breast augmentation emerged as another interest, with survey respondents reporting 68 minutes weekly reviewing those topics.
“The alarming thing is the survey shows teenagers are obviously exploring all sorts of topics as a result of modern-day pressures,” Ellie Puddle, a spokeswoman for parental-control software developer CyberSentinel, told the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.
(That Puddle is alarmed by teens’ curiosity and desire to educate themselves about “modern-day pressures” is alarming in itself.)
The survey admittedly was flawed. For one thing, the sample was too small to reveal any global trends. For another, even the pollster admitted a volunteer sample can be skewed in one direction or another, especially among teens and double-especially when it seeks to investigate a topic like underage sexuality.
