When Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) introduced the Internet Safety & Child Protection Act in July, aiming to slap a 25% excise tax on online purchases of porn, she cited a startling statistic: Children in the U.S. now typically get their first exposure to porn at age 11. It got picked up in several press reports. "The average age at which a child first views Internet porn is 11," pronounced a Denver Post editorial. "The average age a child first views Internet pornography is 11, and those kids don't look away," intoned Matt Lauer on
"The Internet has changed the whole dynamic of porn," declares Tim Wildmon, president of the fundamentalist American Family Association founded by his father, Donald Wildmon, in Tupelo, Miss. "The average age of the introduction to pornography is now 11 years old."
Just one problem: The assertion is untrue, unsupported and likely of dubious origin, none of which has stopped porn's opponents from using it. Sen. Lincoln lifted the factoid from a report issued in July by Third Way, a new Washington think tank that helps Democrats grab on to red-state issues. A press release accompanying the report, by Third Way staffer Sean Barney, proclaimed, "While it is as difficult as ever for a teenager to walk into a store and buy a pornographic magazine, it is as easy as 'point-and-click' for an 11-year-old child to view streaming pornographic video online."
Where did Third Way get that notion? From a May 12 story in the New York Times-owned
"Most of the statistics there have come from literally hundreds of sources, all reputable," Ropelato insists. He says he got the age-11 item from The Drug of the New Millennium, a book about the dangers of porn self-published in 2000 by Mark Kastleman, a self-professed former porn addict in Orem, Utah, who counsels other porn fiends. "I don't remember where I got that from," Kastleman says breezily. "That is a very common statistic." And there the trail goes cold.
But Kimberly Mitchell of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids in Irvine, Calif., say the assertion that "extremely young children" are ogling online porn "may be overstated." Analyzing the results of a random-sample survey of 1,500 kids ages 10 to 17, they recently found that kids don't start seeking out Internet porn until age 14, when they're "age-appropriately curious about sex." Fewer younger kids had gone looking smut--and mostly the old-fashioned way, finding it in their dad's magazines lying around home.
"It seems to suggest the Internet may not be posing the threat that some are concerned it is," says Ybarra.