A Qualitative Study of What US Parents Say and Do When Their Young Children See Pornography.

OBJECTIVE: There is no empirical information about how parents react when they discover that their young children have seen pornography. To address this gap in the literature, the current study sought to improve our understanding of parental reactions to discovering that their children ages <12 years old have seen pornography using a mixed-methods approach. METHODS: A convenience sample of participants (N = 279) was recruited from the online survey service Mechanical Turk. Eligible participants completed an online survey comprising close-ended and open-ended questions about their reactions when their young children saw pornography. Qualitative data were analyzed using a content analysis approach. RESULTS: Parents had 5 main reactions when realizing that their children had viewed pornography: 1) angry, shaming, or punitive; 2) calm and factual; 3) ignoring, minimizing, or denying that it happened; 4) panic or fear; and 5) lying to the child about what the child viewed. Most parents reacted calmly, while a small percentage reported that they hit, scolded, or shamed their young children for seeing the pornography. Many reported not knowing what to say or do. CONCLUSIONS: Development and evaluation of parental scripts for developmentally appropriate parent-child (or pediatrician-child) communication about pornography could benefit the field.

U.S. tabloid magazine coverage of a celebrity dating abuse incident: Rihanna and Chris Brown.

Dating abuse is a prevalent adolescent health problem with substantial public health consequences. As many as 1 in 10 high school students in the United States reports being "hit, slapped, or physically hurt on purpose" by his or her boyfriend or girlfriend in the past year. The authors used the Rihanna-Chris Brown dating abuse incident of 2009 as a case study to conduct what is, to our knowledge, the first assessment of media framing of dating abuse. The authors reviewed the 20 leading U.S. single-copy sales magazines published from February to April 2009 and identified 48 relevant articles, which were all printed in 7 tabloid magazines. The authors conducted a content analysis of the media frames of the articles using 5 frame categories: (a) abuse is objectionable, (b) victim-blaming, (c) abuse is sexualized/romanticized, (d) myths about abuse perpetration, and (e) abuse is normalized. Abuse is objectionable was the dominant frame of 40% of articles, victim-blaming in 36%. Although the majority of articles reviewed (83%) made at least passing reference to the idea that abuse is wrong, a minority (40%) used a dominant frame that condemned abuse. Instead, the majority of articles communicated mixed messages about dating abuse, and many minimized the seriousness of partner abuse perpetration. Advocacy is needed to improve future tabloid media framing of dating abuse incidents.