Students as young as Year 1 and Year 2 accessing pornography: Principal

Principals have said they had seen an increase in boys ‘objectifying girls’ and making ‘inappropriate sexual innuendos or noises’ towards young female teachers.

NSW Parliamentary inquiry into the ‘impacts of harmful pornography on mental, emotional, and physical health’ heard from school principals.

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School principals have said that children as young as six appear to be accessing online pornography based on the school work they produce, and young female teachers are increasingly the subject of inappropriate sexual innuendos by boys.

The educators, speaking on behalf of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools Australia (NSW), made the revelations during a NSW Parliamentary inquiry into the ‘impacts of harmful pornography on mental, emotional, and physical health’, which also heard that specialised government supports for children who engaged in harmful sexual behaviours were being delayed due to high demand.

Principal at Montgrove College in Sydney’s west, Lourdes Mejia, who also heads the Student Wellbeing and Learning Committee at AHISA (NSW), said she was “surprised” by the increasingly young ages of children viewing pornography.

It is understood that children often come across online pornography by accident through ads on gaming websites, for example.

“I would also agree that I’ve seen much younger instances of children, as young as Year Two, Year One. You can see that they have had some access to pornography, from perhaps the stories that they tell or even sometimes the drawings or things that they write, the little notes that they pass to each other, that I have seen recently, that’s quite surprised me,” Ms Mejia said.

Also on Monday, leading violence prevention organisation Our Watch, in association with government and non-government schools, published a blueprint for governments to urgently roll-out Respectful Relationships Education (RRE) across the education system.

The RRE would give school children the skills to reject aggressive behaviours and harassment, and challenge gender stereotypes, amid what Our Watch identified as alarming rates of gendered-violence in schools, including towards female teachers, and sexualised bullying.

Principals Lourdes Mejia and Lorrae Sampson.

Hunter Valley Grammar School Principal Rebecca Butterworth told the Inquiry that the accessing, screenshotting and sharing of sexualised images between primary school students was a major concern, and appeared to be “connected with pornography”.

“I’m quite surprised by the age sometimes. It’s started in our school, sometimes around Year Six, and then accelerated in Year 7,” she told the inquiry.

Nowra Anglican College head Lorrae Sampson said during her time as principal, she had seen an increase in the “objectification of girls” by boys, as well as an increase in boys making “inappropriate sexual innuendos or noises” towards teachers.

“I’ve seen an increase in the objectification of our young girls, in particular, in a sexual way by some boys. I’m also seeing that girls are becoming less empathetic towards each other, and they’re becoming more anxious, particularly when they get up into Years nine and 10, they are less able to negotiate difficult situations with each other as well,” she said.

“And that’s really concerning with girls. I’m seeing girls, and teachers as well, having to put up with boys making inappropriate sexual innuendos or noises, and it’s just that’s an increase that I’ve seen in my time as a principal.”

Hunter Valley Grammar School Principal Rebecca Butterworth.

She said that at least once a week, she would read about a behaviour towards a female teacher in the classroom on their behaviour management system. “And that’s the ones that have just reported it. And it’s happening in the playground, or maybe a comment in the classroom, or maybe one of the other students has reported they’ve heard another person say that.”

Ms Butterworth said this behaviour towards female teachers was “localised” to particular “groups of students and clusters of boys” which then “amplifies throughout the year level and particularly for our younger female teachers as well”.

The Head of a clinical advisory unit at the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network, which provides specialist programs for children aged zero to 17 displaying harmful or problematic sexual behaviours, said “early exposure to pornography by children and prolonged exposure to harmful pornography” was having a clear impact on local health services.

Adjunct Professor Dale Tolliday told the inquiry that “harmful pornography contributes to a high demand for health services across the state, including services for children young people who have displayed problematic and harmful sexual behaviours and sexual assault services”.

“This is occurring on such a scale that in some districts, we have a significant delay in being able to deliver services to ensure adequate and targeted New South Wales Government responses,” he said.

One of the programs he oversees, called New Street Services, provides support for ten to 17 year-old who have engaged in harmful sexual behaviours but are not managed by the criminal justice system. He said of the two services in the Sydney metropolitan area that cover six local health districts “neither can come close to meeting the demand for services at the moment”.

“The volume of requests for service is greater than what our special services can meet, and … part of what we’re doing is to try and find the next best option for them.”