Her candid admission might make it easier for parents to address the effects of such adult material on their children
Billie Eilish has just turned 20. Last week, talking to the radio host Howard Stern on SiriusXM, she discussed the impact that viewing pornography online, at a young age, had had on her. She explained that she was about 11 when she first saw pornography, and that it had given her nightmares, and affected her understanding and expectations of what sex should be. “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said.
The statistics about the age at which children first see pornography online, and the speed at which watching porn becomes normalised, particularly for teenage boys, make for grim reading. In 2019, the British Board of Film Classification commissioned a survey that suggested 51% of 11 to 13-year-olds had seen pornography online. In the majority of cases, this was accidental, and for younger children, in particular, it was traumatic. The study also revealed a disparity between what parents and children understood about the culture of sexual content: only 25% of the parents surveyed thought their child had seen pornography online, while 63% of those parents’ children said that they had seen it.
