00:00 Jennifer Grove: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding, responding to and preventing sexual abuse and assault. My name is Jennifer Grove, and I'm the prevention Director at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. This podcast is the second episode in our sex ed series. Today, Dr. Emily Rothman joins me to talk about her research on a porn literacy program for adolescents. Dr. Rothman is a professor of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, and co-author of, The Truth About Pornography, a pornography literacy curriculum for high school students designed to reduce sexual and dating violence.

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00:58 JG: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Rothman. I'm excited to talk to you about porn literacy for adolescents, and particularly about the research that you've done in this area. Could you talk about how you became involved in this area of work? 

01:14 Dr. Emily Rothman: Yeah, sure. So I definitely did not plan to be a pornography researcher as part of my career. But basically, what happened is I've been studying dating and sexual violence prevention for over a decade, and this one study that I was working on had pornography, as we had asked one question about pornography and it was strongly related to the dating violence thing that we were studying. And so that really got me curious about pornography and what influence, if any, it was having on youth. And so I started investigating that and looking into it. And then right around the same time, in terms of how did I then get involved in developing a pornography literacy curriculum for adolescents, I had always, every year, been invited to come give a little guest talk to adolescents at the local Boston Public Health Commission. They have an after school program for teenagers, where they train them to become peer educators about dating and sexual violence, and so they always had me stop by to say something about my dating and sexual violence research. And this one year when I went, I started talking about that stuff and the kids were just clearly very bored, they were not interested. And so my colleague who works for the program, just said to me, "Hey, aren't you working on some kind of study that had to do with pornography?"

02:49 DR: She was thinking of that research I was just telling you about, and so the minute that just said the word, pornography, the kids, all of a sudden we're very interested in what I had to say. And they had lots of opinions that they wanted to express about what they did and didn't wanna see in pornography. And so after that session, we looked at each other, me and the two adults who facilitate that Boston Public Health Commission after school program. And we thought, "Wow, we could really leverage the kids' obvious interest in talking about pornography by engaging them around that topic and using that as a vehicle for making sure that we do talk with them about other issues that we wanna talk with them about, in a way, like consent and the health of relationships, and also add into that how, what you're seeing in pornography is usually not very realistic or what we know from science, about ways in which pornography can influence some people's behavior," all of that. So we sort of set off on that point on this journey of developing a porn literacy curriculum and pilot testing it with different cohorts of youth from that after school program. And so that was in about 2015. So in 2016, we were really finalizing the first version of our curriculum.

04:18 JG: That's so great. I can definitely identify with being an educator or going in front of a group of students or young people and having them look at me like, "What are you talking about?" Like, "You lost me here, I'm bored," and needing to have something that makes them sit up in their seats. [chuckle] And I can imagine saying the word pornography was definitely something that caused them to become quite a lot more alert, right? 

04:45 DR: Exactly, yeah.

04:48 JG: So could you tell us, you've touched a little bit on this, but can you tell us a bit about the program and the research? 

04:54 DR: Yeah, sure. So let me tell you just a little bit about the curriculum itself, first. Basically, this is a nine-topic curriculum, and each topic can be covered in about one hour. And so we've at this point, trained, probably, hundreds of different teachers and sexuality education folks, and they choose to use it in different ways so sometimes they'll double up and teach the entire curriculum in just five sessions. Sometimes they'll do just one week, one session and then it can take nine weeks, so people do different things with it, but basically nine sessions. And we cover a bunch of content in there. At first, we just start out by talking about why are we even talking about pornography? What is pornography? How has it been defined legally, the difference between obscenity and pornography, or is there a difference between erotica and pornography? There really isn't, for the most part, by the way. But we kinda talk about some definitional issues and then why we think it might be important to have that kind of conversation. I think one of the things I'd like to say about the curriculum is that it's sex positive. One of the ways in which maybe it's different from some of the other programs or just approaches that have been used out there before, is that it is pretty nonjudgmental.

06:27 DR: So there's a no shaming standpoint, and we try to stick very close to the science and what we actually know about sexually explicit media. And within that, then give kids sort of a framework for thinking about whether they ever wanna see porn and if they do, how they're gonna interpret it. So that said, one of the things that we do talk about as part of session two, kinda early in the curriculum is the history of sexually explicit images in society, like ancient part that show naked people. Why did they have that? And then at what point in history did sexually explicit images get considered off-limits or how was it put off-limits, and for who and who put it off-limits, and who has the power to make those kind of decisions? So we really contextualize the entire discussion about pornography and what it does and doesn't do to people, does and does not do to people, in this broader discussion about the politics behind it as well. But then we do get into things like norms, those kinds of social norms that might be promoted through mainstream internet pornography, the whole question of whether some people can become compulsive about pornography use. And then we talk about things like intimacy and healthy flirting, and dating and caring for other people. We do talk about the possible link to commercial sexual exploitation.

07:56 DR: And we talk about things like the non-consensual dissemination of sexually explicit images, which is a really long way of saying, other people may have heard of it called, "revenge porn," which is not an official way of calling it. But anyway, so we talk about when people maybe like doctor images or without somebody's consent be sending around images that had been sexted to them, so sexually explicit selfies, which is relevant for teens, they need to know the laws about that and implications. And we talk to them also about their peers and how they can be ambassadors in a way for what they've learned with peers and be part of social norms change in that way. So that's a little bit of a walk through the curriculum. And then we have done research, we've tried to collect pre and post test data from kids who go through the curriculum in order to compare what they know and their attitudes and some of their behavioral intentions related to pornography before they go through the class, and then after they go through the class. So we haven't yet done that compared to a control group that doesn't get the class, and that would be a great next step that we can get funding for research for that.

09:19 JG: Thank you so much. Yeah, that would be an excellent next step. You talk a little bit about sharing the science and sticking to the science, and I know that we've talked before about this concept of inviting adolescents to become critical thinkers and critical consumers of the research and the science on pornography. Can you talk a little bit about that concept? 

09:45 DR: Yeah, this really comes... I think it's a strength of the Start Strong program, which is the Dating and Sexual Violence Prevention Program at the Boston Public Health Commission. I think it's a strength of their staff that they really recognize how to use positive youth development and how to use, I guess, best practices for adolescent education in all of the different types of interventions that they do. So it wasn't a big stretch for them to draw on that incredible knowledge and know how that they have from really truly engaging adolescents and getting them on board with something, to start using that for this intervention as well. And so some of what I think the lessons learned and just from understanding how adolescents work and what engages them as learners, you don't wanna try to just jam something down their throat. So if you're really heavy-handed and you have a message like pornography is bad, it's the worst thing, and it's just gonna hurt you and it's gonna hurt everybody know, and there's no ifs, ands or buts, or there's no other perspective on... If you're just a one-sided perspective and you do nothing but try to force that on them, that's a turn-off to adolescents.

11:05 DR: That's a turn-off to adults, often as well, but particularly, with adolescents, what we found is that offering up to them the best available evidence from the research about what pornography does and doesn't do or there are some studies that find, for example, that pornography seems to have a negative impact in this particular way on boys in the sample, but it didn't have those same effect on girls. And then wondering why might that be or are there other studies that found something different? And allowing them to, I guess, walk alongside you through a literature of you in a way and dig into the fact that not all the studies find have only negative effects or that there's some nuance or complexity, and what we know about how pornography may affect people, that that strikes them, I think usually as more realistic and also allow... It's like a little openness in there that allows them to question with you, think with you, and it just tends to build trust in some way and engage them better. So I guess that's the pitch for why we would use that more, like critical thinking approach rather than just trying to sell them on one kind of mantra.

12:35 JG: I think that's one of the reasons I like this program, is because of that approach. You said about inviting them in and allowing them to sort of learn with you, and I think that goes a long way in helping them to develop those critical thinking skills. So I love that approach. What effects have you seen, and thinking about the research, what effects have you seen from the implementation of this program? And have there been any changes or updates to the program, from what you're learning? 

13:05 DR: Yeah, great question. So it's hard to say that the changes that we observed from pretest to post test, for example, when we're evaluating are definitely attributable to our intervention, because it's possible they could have been, at the same time, they're enrolled in our class, maybe they're getting some other information about porn from elsewhere, and that should really get the credit. It's pretty unlikely, 'cause there just aren't that many sources of information for kids about pornography. So I can tell you that there are things like, for example, some of the kids start off in our class with this idea that being in professional pornography is a good way to make a lot of money, they think it would be glamorous and fun to be a porn star. And so for example, we found that 52% of them believe that a pre-test, and that it goes down to only 21% of them agreeing with that a post test, so that's one example. Another one is that at the pre-test, 26% of the youth in the class said that they thought that pornography was really realistic, 0% agreed at follow-up. So those are the kinds of indicators that we see that gives us some confidence that they are learning something from this curriculum, it does appear to be associated with some changes, knowledge and attitudes. And if those kind of findings are exciting to listeners, then we have a full set of results available in a couple of peer-reviewed research articles that are out there on it.

14:44 DR: In terms of whether those evaluation studies have resulted in any changes to the curriculum, it's not so much that the evaluation stuff has resulted in changes. But I would say that because, as I said, we started in 2016, and here we are in 2020, there's a new research that comes out all the time about what's the content of pornography, or what's the impact of pornography on relationship stability, or what's the impact of pornography on eating disorder or body self-image, there's new articles that come out every month. And so, one of the ways that we have to keep this curriculum changing is constantly updating to try to reflect the new knowledge and the new information that's come out. So we do that to the best of our ability and that's one change. The other thing is thinking about how to involve adolescents who've been through the program as peer educators, like actually training them up to deliver the intervention themselves, and they do that in partnership with a qualified adult who's trained and sort of keeps an eye on things as well, but empowering youth to have this be a youth-delivered intervention is something that I think we're proud of, and being able to deliver it on the Zoom, which, yes, you can do.

16:10 DR: Especially during COVID times, our team had to pivot and make sure that we knew how to train adult facilitators who wanna teach the curriculum that we can train them online, and we did that over Zoom. And then the teens who are involved in the Boston Public Health Commission are delivering it via Zoom to other peers this fall for the first time so there is gonna be a Zoom version of it. I guess those are the major changes.

16:40 JG: That's so great. And definitely something to think about right now, like you were saying in our COVID-19 times, lots of educators, people doing prevention work or trying to figure out how do I do my work in a virtual setting. And so I love the fact that you all are thinking through that and learning how to use Zoom as many of us are, and other platforms to deliver the education. And I also really appreciate this sort of full circle approach as well with training the young people to be peer educators, so that they then delivering the program to other young-people.

17:24 DR: Exactly. And talk about ways to engage teenagers if you get... So number one, yes, it's fun to talk about pornography if you're a teen, but talking about it with other teens, even that much better in some cases than just hearing it all laid out to you by an adult.

17:43 JG: Definitely. You also mentioned there are several peer-reviewed articles about the research, and I am a bit of a research geek, I love to do a deep dive into that. And so I just wanted to mention to our listeners that we will be linking to those or to the locations where you can access those in the show notes, so just so everyone knows, we will have that up online. And so the last question I have for you, in thinking about everything you've shared, which has been so important and so informative. What advice would you give to people listening who may want to implement this program? 

18:22 DR: Yeah. Well, one thing is really easy, we're offering an online training. It is, I think, relatively not that expensive. It's $125 to get trained in how to use the curriculum, and you also get a copy in the mail of the curriculum itself for that. And we're having our next online training on December 4th. There's an Eventbrite link and I'll make sure that you have that to share on your website as well. So anyone who wants to facilitate, really, the thing to do is sign up for a training, we will walk you through it and kinda tell you how to lead the activities, give you the philosophy behind why we do what we do, some information about the science that informs the curriculum, and then we're super hands-off. The whole point is to make it as accessible as possible, and we have encouraged other people who've gone through our training to make the adaptations that they need to make and modify it in order to use it with whatever local group they wanna use it with. People often ask at this point, how do parents feel about their kids going to a porn literacy class? Well, one thing I should have said upfront is we don't ever show any porn to teenagers, just to be perfectly clear about that. So it isn't like we're showing kids how to watch porn, which is one misunderstanding that people can have along the way. We don't do that.

19:54 DR: And we were worried or we thought that there would be parents who would be nervous and, "Oh, I don't want these strangers talking to my kids about porn." It turns out that to a person, parents have been like, "Thank you for taking this on. Thank you for being willing to talk to my kid about porn. I don't know what to say, I don't wanna talk about this." And so, that's generally the reaction we've gotten. We did design this originally for use with an after school program, which avoid or avoided that whole question of, "Well, what is the superintendent gonna say or the school board and that... " We didn't set it up that we had to get permission from a school board to implement it. And so we have had teachers and educators who've used it in school systems ask us for any advice as they go through and get permissions, but I have heard a lot of success stories. Again, where you would worry that people would be scared of this topic or not wanna talked about, one thing is that the new national sexuality education standards that have just come out, list in them, that kids...

21:04 DR: There's kind of different bullet points about what you should be teaching 10th graders, and 11th graders, and 12th graders, and middle school kids. But pornography is in there, it is now recommended to schools that they have to say something about pornography because it is widespread, and I think everybody's pretty acutely aware that unless we address this upfront, kids are gonna find it themselves and they're gonna draw their own conclusions about it. For that reason, I think there's more and more school boards, principals, educators, who are open to the idea that we're gonna need something. And they see this curriculum, they like the messages and that they feel comfortable with the approach, with the fact that it is pretty straightforward and not too heavy-handed, I guess, I would say, in terms of one perspective or the other, so it kind of avoids politics in that way. And people have had like using it in schools, so there's that going for it as well.

22:07 JG: Excellent, thank you. And thanks for mentioning the standards around sexuality education, because I think that's important. And absolutely, if you wanna be following the standards and in line with the standard, this is a great curriculum to help you address that so I appreciate you sharing that as well. So thank you so much, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you joining us today. And we do invite folks to learn more about your research and about the porn literacy curriculum by checking out the links that will be in the show notes. So thank you for joining us, Dr. Rothman.

22:45 DR: Thank you so much.

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23:03 JG: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing, resources@nsvrc.org.