Fears over impact of porn on Watford schoolgirls

But she hopes new teaching resources developed with a local charity will help girls understand normal sexual behaviour.

With the help of Watford-based charity Dignify, Watford Grammar School for Girls is creating teaching resources to start a conversation about porn with their students.

It comes in response to pornography being more easily accessible than for previous generations due to social media and 4G.

Children using mobile phones and laptops

Headteacher Sylvia Tai, 51, said: “Over the last few years we’ve become more aware of the fact that girls’ sexual experiences are being marred by what they believe is normal behaviour, but we can actually get them to see that it wasn’t normal, because the way that it has affected them is not normal.

“The root cause of this problem is that in many cases the person that they had their first sexual relations with thought it was normal because they had learnt through pornography.”

Dignify, which was set up by a local mum, aims to build and share a new narrative for healthy relationships.

The charity has been distributing questionnaires to Watford school pupils since October, which unearthed startling statistics about the effect it was having on youngsters.

A young woman on her mobile phone

The survey, based on 1,009 secondary school pupils between October 2020 and February 202, also revealed 73 per cent of the young people watching porn do so using mobile phones.

Miss Tai continued: “Students are either knowingly or unknowingly accessing materials such as pornography.

“Suddenly they’re holding information in their hands that they didn’t know or don’t want and it is pervasive in that once they’ve seen it, they can’t unsee it.

“This is having an impact on the schoolgirls’ understanding of sexual relationships - what is normal within a sexual relationship? What is a healthy sexual relationship?

“We do think it’s our responsibility as part of safeguarding to proactively find ways to help students to stay safe.”

Mobile phone usage

The school is looking at the issue with girls in a way that acknowledges girls matures at different stages, and ensures the conversation builds over time.

Miss Tai added: “What we’ve seen is that students respond to resources that they can connect with, and that’s why I think the real strength of Dignify is that it’s Watford-based, and therefore the messages that they’re getting are from people they can identify with – from their town, their environment, their age group.”

The resources being built by Dignify are still being developed using data received from the questionnaires sent to students, but the pandemic has delayed the process.

Miss Tai stressed it’s “incredibly important” for youngsters to have these conversations – despite in many cases talking about the subjects being socially unacceptable.

Young boys on mobile phones

She added: “It’s a bit like mental health, we wouldn’t have been talking about it in such an open way 15 years ago as no one really addressed it.

“But now it’s a very common conversation and it happens throughout schools.

“Hopefully we can start doing that with pornography, we need to make it a conversation that’s easier to have.”

For more information about Dignify click here.