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Sexual content: Watching films such as Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman from 1994, can affect young people's sexual habit
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Children who watch films with a high s**xual content tend to lose their virginity earlier and have more partners, a study has found.
Not only are they more promiscuous, they are also more likely to engage in risky s**x by not using condoms.
The six-year study of more than 1,200 teens refers to s**xual content in films but campaigners against online porn say it could equally apply to videos on the internet.
They point out that children can now see a lot more s**xual imagery online than they ever did at the cinema – meaning that the effect will be magnified.
P*rn*gr*phic images and videos are freely available on the net, many on sites with no age verification procedures at all, putting children at risk.
The NSPCC warns that young male teens are now pressurising their girlfriends to copy what they see on porn films downloaded from the internet.
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| YOUNG GIRL WATCHING P*RN ONLINE |
Other reviews have found that exposure to porn makes boys more likely to view girls as s**x objects.
The Daily Mail is campaigning for an automatic block on online p**rn.
Over-18s would be able to see adult material only if they specifically opted in.
The study on the effect on younger teenagers of s**x in films was published in Psychological Science, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Researchers from Dartmouth College, an Ivy League university in the US, surveyed 684 top-grossing movies from 1998 to 2004, and then coded them for s*xual content.
A film such as Eyes Wide Shut would be coded highly, while Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King would get a low coding.
Although some of the films had 18-ratings, they could have been seen by younger children on DVDs at home.
The researchers then recruited 1,228 youngsters aged between 12 and 14, and each was asked which films on the list they had seen from a number of different collections of 50 that were randomly selected.
