An Australian university study has revealed that pornographic material downloaded from the Net is being sold by children in the playground. Some kids are distributing explicit CD-ROMs and floppy disks to make a quick buck.
The study by the University of Western Sydney found that children don't believe the material is harmful.
The research examined how they construe different forms of media and its harmful affects.
Lots of children surveyed mentioned "knowing [others] who are able to remove filters," Associate Professor at the school of communication and media, University of Western Sydney, Virginia Nightingale, told ZDNet.
Children were far more concerned about damage to their reputation if they're found to have accessed porn sites by their parents, according to Nightingale.
"The problem was that they thought they might get into trouble for knowing about [Internet porn sites]," Nightingale said. "And the danger to one's reputation if being found to be engaging in the act [of looking porn on the Net] from school authorities, parents and even friends," she added.
The study, carried out in conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), surveyed 50 children aged between 10 and 15.
Pornographic material downloaded from the Web was found to be openly distributed and sold by schoolboys and that girls, relatively unperturbed by this, felt offended if they stumbled across pornographic material on the Web.
"Quite a number of groups [surveyed] mentioned boys collecting porn on the Web and selling it to friends," Nightingale said. But often if they typed in something innocuous and a porn site came up they felt angered that it was out of their control, she added.
However, children didn't know what to do about this problem other than to delete the images or exit the site, Nightingale said. Children tended not to talk to parents about this in case their parents thought they'd done it on purpose or were blamed for accessing inappropriate sites.
The report found that there didn't appear to be much scope for discussion of 'media harm' between children and parents.
"Parents need to be a little more involved about engaging with children about what they come across on the Net," Nightingale said.
