Children as young as 8 are involuntarily exposed to hardcore porn: 'There were huge tits. I felt so criminal'

Max was in second grade when he first saw porn. Nikolaj was about eight years old, and Cecilie had just turned eleven.

On the screens in front of them, there was an overflow of enormous silicone breasts, shaved bodies, and violent penises.

"When I saw it for the first time, I remember there were huge tits. They were so adult. I felt so criminal because I was young," says Max.

In a new DR documentary, 'Alone at Home with Porn', several young Danes tell how, as children – as young as eight years old – they were confronted with porn on the internet and throughout their teenage years.

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> There were quite a few men who needed to jerk off to us.

> Cecilie

The young people appear only by first name, but share for the first time how porn from an early age has affected their sex lives. DR knows their full identities.

Nikolaj was also in second grade when a friend's older sister showed him a porn video online, which kickstarted his own porn consumption.

"This was very intense. Big breasts and loud moans. It was a whole new world that opened up and spread like ripples in water," he says.

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'It was very intense'

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Common to the experiences is the easy access to the internet, but the first encounters happened in very different ways.

For Cecilie, the first boundary-crossing experiences began on the now-closed video service Omegle, where users saw each other and talked via webcams.

"We quickly found out that it wasn't just people you could talk to, but also dicks you could talk to. There were quite a few men who needed to jerk off to us. It's crazy that as a child you can have access to such a large medium and then come across dicks," she says.

For several of the young people in the documentary, the involuntary encounters with porn became the starting point for their own porn consumption.

And Cecilie's, Nikolaj's, and Max's early debut with porn is far from unique.

A survey conducted by Epinion for DR shows that if you zoom in on the 18–34 age group, 67 percent of them saw porn for the first time before they turned 16. 27 percent of them were under 13 the first time.

Cecilie herself started watching porn at age 11, but already in the first years the videos gradually became more and more violent. She remembers, for example, a video where two men chain a woman, strap her down, and whip her until she bleeds.

"When I look at myself as a young person and think about that video, I don't think it was something I should have seen," says Cecilie.

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Serious consequences

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The early encounters with porn can, however, have serious consequences for young people, according to several experts. According to Save the Children Denmark, it can end up affecting children's development.

"When children see, for example, violent pornographic material unwanted and at too young an age, you could say they are pushed forward in a development they are not ready for. Children's development happens step by step. You have to crawl before you can walk," assesses psychologist Pernille Spitz.

Last year, Save the Children Denmark established the counseling service 'TalMedOs' for children and young people. Since then, they have provided counseling in 266 cases, where concerns about porn consumption are the most frequent problem.

Here, children and young people have described, among other things, how porn consumption very early becomes a fixed part of their daily lives, and that the videos they consume become more violent and more boundary-crossing over time, because ordinary porn is no longer sufficient.

Watch both episodes of the documentary 'Alone at Home with Porn' on DRTV:

Documentary | 1 SEASON Alone at Home with Porn ( https://www.dr.dk/drtv/serie/alene-hjemme-med-porno_613684 )

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