Porn watching, sexting among teens on rise

There is a "concerning pattern" among young Canadian students in watching porn and 'sexting' has also become commonplace among teenagers, a survey shows.

"In our survey, 40 percent of boys admitted to looking for porn online and the ones that did typically said they were frequently searching for it," Matthew Johnson, director of education for MediaSmarts, an Ottawa-based digital literacy outfit, was quoted as saying.

The researchers conducted a survey with 5,436 students in grades four through 11 about their lives online.

Questions about sexuality were limited to the older students in grades seven through 11.

"There is a significant number of students, and boys obviously in particular, for whom it is a really frequent behaviour," Johnson noted.

A third of the boys who admitted to viewing porn said they did so daily while another third said they did so at least once a week.

Almost one in five said it was at least once a month, the survey revealed.

"They are still developing their sexuality so heavy exposure to pornography can be problematic in all of these areas," Johnson added.

Only seven per cent of the girls said they had sought out pornography online.

The numbers were higher among the oldest Grade 11 students in the study.

Of all the respondents who said they had sent a "sext", about 25 per cent of them said they knew of their message being passed on to others.