As many as 90 percent of people in their 20s watched pornographic movies as minors and many considered porn a good way to gain knowledge about sex, a Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) survey showed yesterday.
“It’s quite worrying that many people are learning about sex from porn videos,” TWRF executive director Kang Shu-hua (康淑華) told a press conference. “Especially when sex education is not being taught very well.”
She said that in some Nordic countries, sex education starts as early as kindergarten, while “sex education in Taiwan is certainly insufficient and there is a serious lack of resources.”
“It’s dangerous because young people may get the wrong idea about sex, which could lead to problems in them getting along with their partners in the future,” Kang said.
“It could also cause an increase in sex crimes,” she said.
Kang was citing results from a survey conducted earlier this month by the foundation that received 1,676 valid samples from respondents between 21 and 30 years of age.
According to the survey, 36.2 percent of respondents had watched porn for the first time when they were younger than 13, while 54.6 percent said they had watched porn when they were between 13 and 17 years old.
Sun Chyng-fong (孫晴峰), clinical associate professor of media studies at New York University, released the results of another survey with 3,500 valid responses in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, Britain, Germany and Italy, which showed that Taiwanese were more likely to have watched porn than people in the other five countries.
“Among Taiwanese respondents, only 11.8 percent said sex education at school was helpful, 6.1 percent said sex education by family members was helpful, while 48.9 percent of those who had watched porn said that they agreed or partly agreed that porn was the main channel through which they learned about sex,” Sun said.
Worried about the findings, Kang said sex education at school should be more than teaching about sexual organs, “rather, it needs to teach students more about gender awareness and intimate relationships.”
“There should be different content designed for different age groups,” she added.
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