Parents' excruciating sex chats with sons more important than ever

Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. One Sunday evening, when I was in primary six at David Livingstone Primary School in Blantyre, my mother ruined a perfectly pleasant night in front of the telly with the words: 'I think we should have a chat about things.' I can still remember freezing, as if suddenly confronted by some mortal danger. 'It's fine,' I said, 'We don't have to.' She got the message and that was the end of my late mother's attempt to have with me the traditional talk about the birds, the bees, and the sex I might one day have with women. Forty years later, my son was in primary six and I ruined a perfectly pleasant night in front of the telly with the words: 'You're going to see some things on your mates' phones…' It is, of course, traditional for each new generation to scandalise its predecessors with lives of great decadence and depravity. Young folk have never known they're born, have they? But, when it comes to sex and relationships, things really are not what they once were. Last week, it emerged police in Sydney were investigating the death of a 16-year-old girl in a suspected incident of sexual choking. We do not, yet, know the full details of that devastating case but we do know that, not only is strangulation incredibly dangerous, but that it is increasingly common among young people. A 2024 report by the Home Office-funded Institute for Addressing Strangulation revealed more than a third – 35 per cent – of people in the UK aged between 16-34 have experienced being choked or strangled at least once during consensual sex. What would once have been considered, without question, a violent sexual assault is now thought quite normal by a significant number of people. If I am surprised by this, it is only because the number is lower than I had imagined it might be. The reason I raised with the boy, six years ago, the prospect of him seeing things on phones in the playground is because, even then, this kind of violent behaviour had become normalised in the pornography that it had long become impossible to prevent children seeing. Yes, of course, one could (as I did) install all kinds of filters on the internet at home and restrict ownership of a smartphone, but it would take a remarkable degree of naivety to believe that children can be prevented from seeing this stuff. The kid who turned up in my playground with two copies of Razzle found in his dad's shed is now the kid showing his mates violent and degrading porn on his iPhone. Boys will be boys. The recent introduction of online age verification legislation is reported by porn site owners to have had a significant impact on online traffic. A spokesperson for the site Pornhub said visits from the UK had fallen by half since the law came into force earlier this year. On the face of it then, age verification has worked and young people are, in great numbers, being prevented from accessing material that depicts the violent degradation of women. But to believe that, one would need never to have met a teenager. The use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) soared after the new age restrictions were launched. We should always treat claims made by companies with vested interests with a degree of scepticism but, even if use of their services has not leapt by the 1800 per cent some say it has, it is surely not impossible to imagine that a teenage boy who previously accessed extreme pornography on a daily basis before the new law might have taken the five minutes required to download a free VPN then carry on as he had done previously. Just because a computer accessing Pornhub doesn't appear to be in the UK, that doesn't mean it isn't in a teenager's bedroom in Falkirk or Dumfries. The pornography industry was estimated by Cognitive Market Research to have been worth $182 billion in 2025 and is expected to have reached annual revenues of $277bn by 2033. There's big money in the systematic abuse of women. Of course, it's right that the Government acts to make it as difficult as possible for children to access violent pornography but, realistically, this is symbolic legislation. Porn, like drugs, is unstoppable. Since the law can't really help, parents – and this may require a degree of hypocrisy – have no choice but to talk with their children about pornography and the reality behind it. Because if not us, who else? Who else is going to tell our children that what they are watching is a grotesque corruption of the idea of intimacy. Who else is going to tell them that, in too many cases to count, they're watching the filmed rape of drug-addicted women? Pornography spirals like a man who's lost control. What might have been considered extreme 20 years ago is now positively vanilla compared with the acts being filmed and distributed today. And tomorrow those films won't be enough for the consumer who wants it harder, faster, more extreme. The vulnerable young women working in the porn industry are expected to submit to increasingly degrading and dangerous acts of endurance. It's not easy to know how far to take this subject with our children. Yes, we become parents understanding our responsibility to show some moral guidance and to offer comfort, but there is something unsettling about the knowledge that, even in some small way, one might be shaping a child's future sex life in even the smallest way. That is very much their business. But when boys and girls are being told – and shown – that sex should be violent and dangerous, we have no choice but to have those excruciating conversations, again and again.