Popular Culture and Pornography Education to Improve the Efficacy of Secondary School Staff Response to Student Sexual Harassment

Abstract

As middle and high school students consume and create their own pornography or use it as a form of violence perpetration known as image-based sexual abuse, school staff struggle to find appropriate responses to these issues. As pornography use becomes more prevalent, and discourse on sexual violence more public, pornography education could become a tool for preventing sexual violence and promoting sexual health. In response, we explored the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of PopPorn, a 4-module pornography and IBSA professional development training program in a sample of staff who work for Midwestern public schools (i.e., schools providing free public education funded by tax dollars and maintained by local government). Results indicate that the majority of staff perceive student pornography use and IBSA perpetration to be critical problems that negatively impact school climate. Results also indicate that the PopPorn brief intervention increases staff knowledge of and efficacy in addressing pornography and IBSA-related problems and reduces harmful sexual double standard attitudes that have been linked to victim blaming in instances of sexual violence. This promising program adds to a growing number of media and pornography literacy interventions aimed at improving sexual violence prevention and response.

Keywords:

• Media literacy
• pornography
• school-based sex education
• sexting
• sexual harassment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Drs. Molly Countermine and Amelia Lawless, the Sacramento State Peer Health Educators, the East Lansing Sexuality Education Advisory Board, the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health, Kayln Coppedge, and Lydia Rutkowski for their roles in the development and evaluation of this curriculum.

Ethical approval

Human subjects research ethics board approval, The Michigan State University IRB approved this study on March 1, 2019 (STUDY00002252).

Disclosure statement

The authors would like to declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.