Children and pornography: the cry of alarm from a school nurse

“We must act, and quickly, it is urgent”. In Le Parisien of November 8, Samia, a school nurse in Seine-Saint-Denis, bangs her fist on the table and warns of an increasingly worrying phenomenon: the exposure of children to pornography. In 16 years in the business, she assures her, she “had never seen that”. And according to this woman in the field, “the confinement, with the excess of cell phones, has exacerbated the situation. I clearly saw the difference when the young people came back to class.

At 12, 1 in 3 children has seen porn

How does this materialize at school? The examples cited by the nurse are terrifying and prove the urgency to act: “I was first struck by what I heard in the corridors. There were a lot of sexualized comments like “go suck somewhere else”. I saw students miming fellatio by puffing out their cheeks. As a reminder, the expert is talking here about children attending primary school. In 2018, an Opinion Way survey warned of this worrying phenomenon: at the age of 12, 1 in 3 children had already been exposed to a pornographic image.

"From CM1, I have to intervene"

This year, Samia set up awareness workshops for the first time for students… from the age of 9. “Previously, my interventions were mainly in middle school. But there, from CM1, I have to intervene, confides Samia to the Parisian. Because I find myself faced with children who talk about fellatio, penetration through the buttocks. Their language is raw when at that age, they should talk about caresses and kisses. »

The dreadful "rainbow game"

Samia tells another edifying anecdote: “Last year, in a college where I was working, I learned that 5th graders were playing the rainbow game. It consisted for the girls, to put on lipstick, to practice oral sex and to see with the trace left by the lipstick which level they had reached. »

The timid action of the government

Major problem and today insoluble: pornography for minors is accessible in one click. The editors of these sites, obsessed with their audience, pay very little attention to child protection. What does the government do ? In February, he launched the "I protect my child" platform to combat the exposure of minors to online pornography. His goal ? Advise parents on setting up parental controls. In addition, a law passed in July 2020 requires porn sites to verify the age of their users. Big problem, this law is only very little respected. Two child protection associations, e-Enfance and la Voix de l’enfant, have sued the main French Internet service providers. They thus hope to obtain the blocking of several pornographic sites whose access to minors is too easy. As for the Ministry of National Education, it allows gendarmes, trained on the subject, to intervene in schools.

“I sent young people to a health center”

Clearly insufficient measures for Samia, very worried about the youth of our country: “We are very worried about the behaviors that this can generate and the psychological impacts. I sent young people to health centres. And then these are people who can find themselves victims of sexual assault because they no longer have any safeguards with respect to their bodies. »