Protecting children and young people from online harms.

The Issue

 

Children are encountering extreme online content younger than ever before - often by accident, often before they're ready. Average age of first exposure to pornography is 11-13 years old, and much of what they encounter depicts violence, coercion, misogyny, and illegal sexual acts. Curiosity is not necessarily harmless. It’s shaping how young minds understand sex, relationships, and themselves — at a critical stage of development, with serious implications for mental health, wellbeing, and behaviour.

 

 

Why It Matters

 

Online content doesn’t stay online. It informs beliefs, expectations, and sexual scripts — influencing how young people understand consent, pleasure, power, and relationships. Children themselves are worried; reporting a host of negative feelings such as fear and anxiety in response to premature pornography exposure, as well as body-image concerns, and - perhaps even more critically - concern that violent pornography could become a blueprint for their generation's understanding of sex.

 

Extreme content can complicate the already difficult period of sexual development for children and adolescents by giving rise to complex feelings and concerns in response to what they've seen. It can lead to addictive behaviours with potential for harmful long-term outcomes. The potential malleability of adolescents' sexuality and sexual arousal combined with easy-to-access extreme material as well as the risk of a desensitisation pathways towards illegal content - including child sexual abuse material - is cause for alarm.

 

 

Our Responsibility

 

Regulation and age verification measures are a start, but they can’t keep up with digital reality. Young people easily bypass barriers, and plenty of harmful content circulates on mainstream platforms with much exposure coming via social media rather than dedicated pornography platforms. Today's children are growing up with and in an online world quite different from anything most adults would have experienced.

 

Policy alone can't solve a problem we don't even fully comprehend. As a society, we owe children and young people a multilevel response to understanding and navigating the contemporary adolescent experience, and protecting their right to happy and healthy sexual and social development. 

 

 

What Is The Yellow Wood Project?

 

At The Yellow Wood Project, we recognize the complexity of the online world that children are navigating during critical stages of development. Many with troubling sexual thoughts neither wish to act on them nor should face stigma, they deserve a supportive and trauma-informed response.

 

We exist to try to understand and intervene. We are working to combine a structured approach to behaviour change with systems thinking to conduct psychologically-informed, evidenced-based interventions that meet children and young people where they are at and support them in their sexual and social development. When children struggle with harmful thoughts or behaviours, two roads diverge. Our mission is to help them take the right one—because that choice makes all the difference.