‘I watched porn morning, midday and night time’

Shaun Flores was 11 years outdated when he first began watching porn, after being launched to it by a pal.

“I used to be hooked nearly instantly,” the now 30-year-old says.

“It was identical to, wow, what is that this that persons are doing the place they appear like they’re simply having the time of their lives.”

Shaun’s curiosity rapidly changed into one thing that he discovered tough to cease.

He describes watching porn morning, midday and night time, saying it turned as “frequent as brushing your enamel”.

Shaun has shared his story in a brand new BBC iPlayer collection, Sex After.

“I realised there was a difficulty after I had no vitality to do something,” he says. “I did not need to play soccer, I simply needed to be inside.

“But there was the guilt and the disgrace that got here with it, and it doesn’t matter what I attempted to do, I couldn’t cease watching it.

“That’s after I knew there was one thing up.”

While not everybody who watches porn will develop an unhealthy relationship with it, Shaun isn’t alone in his viewing habits.

Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 report suggests 29% of UK adults accessed on-line porn in May 2024. Additionally, new analysis from habit remedy centre, UKAT, means that hundreds of thousands of Britons are viewing pornography repeatedly – with 1.8 million watching each day, some a number of instances a day.

According to remedy suppliers, extra persons are looking for assist for problematic porn use.

Dr Paula Hall, a UKCP-accredited sexual and relationship psychotherapist at The Laurel Centre, in London, specialises in serving to folks affected by intercourse habit and porn habit.

“The numbers of purchasers looking for assist with pornography issues at The Laurel Centre have doubled over current years, as have our requests from well being professionals for additional coaching,” she tells the BBC.

Dr Hall explains that they’ve additionally seen a rising variety of youthful folks looking for assist.

“Ten years in the past the vast majority of our purchasers would have been married males of their 40s and 50s who have been looking for assist as a result of their companion had found their use of intercourse employees,” she says.

“But more and more, our purchasers are of their 20s and 30s, lots of whom are single, who’re recognising the rising toll of porn use on their lives and on their skill to get or preserve a relationship.”

Lee Fernandes, lead therapist on the UKAT Group, additionally says the variety of folks they deal with for problematic porn use has risen “considerably” lately.

They now obtain a number of enquiries for assist from folks battling their porn use each single day. Prior to 2020, it was one or two enquiries per week

Fernandes explains that developments in know-how and the following straightforward accessibility of porn is making it simpler for folks of all ages to entry sexual content material on-line. He believes his is contributing to the rise in folks looking for assist that he has skilled.

“It’s not very exhausting for somebody to drag out their cellphone, go onto a website and have a look at porn, whether or not they’re 12 years outdated or 60 years outdated,” he says. “It is kind of troubling.”

According to Fernandes, different causes for folks watching porn on-line embrace curiosity, boredom, stress aid and lack of sexual satisfaction.

While porn use would possibly begin for these causes, Fernandes describes it as being “very addictive”.

“It fulfils that dopamine reward system,” he explains. “Once you begin it is fairly tough to cease.”

However, whereas problematic porn use would possibly mimic an habit, it isn’t diagnostically recognised as such.

Instead, it’s categorised as problematic on-line pornography use (POPU), or compulsive behaviour.

For individuals who develop this relationship with porn, the results may be unfavorable.

And for the youngest in society who’re rising up with free, hardcore content material at their fingertips, the impression of early overexposure may be far reaching.

The Children’s Commissioner for England promotes and protects the rights of youngsters.

Recent analysis from their workplace discovered that, in 2023, 10% of youngsters had seen porn by the age of 9 and 27% had seen it by age 11.

“Young folks inform me their publicity to pornography is widespread and normalised – with the typical age at which youngsters first seeing pornography being 13 years outdated,” Dame Rachel de Souza, the present Children’s Commissioner, tells the BBC.

“Pornography is now not confined to devoted grownup websites – youngsters inform me they’ll see violent content material, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sexual acts on social media.

“The implications of seeing this sort of materials are huge – my analysis has discovered that frequent customers of pornography usually tend to interact in bodily aggressive intercourse acts.”

De Souza provides that it’s “important” for high-quality relationship and intercourse training to be given parity of significance with different topics to assist younger folks perceive that pornography is unrealistic.

Silva Neves, a psychotherapist who specialises within the remedy of compulsive sexual behaviours, agrees that viewing porn at a younger age can have a unfavorable impression.

However, he emphasises that the shortage of high quality intercourse training for younger folks results in them in search of info elsewhere.

“They’re then going to see hairless vulvas,” he says. “They’re going to see 9in penises.

“They’re going to see exhausting intercourse lasting for half-hour and choking, and all these items, and they will assume, ‘okay, so that is intercourse’.

“But it’s a lot simpler to level the finger at porn and say porn is the issue.”

Courtney Daniella Boateng, 26, first began watching porn when she was at major college.

For her, it was partly pushed by the shortage of correct intercourse training accessible to her. She explains that her courses in school have been focussed on the biology of copy, moderately than the expertise of intercourse.

She says that the taboo that appeared to exist round it made it much more fascinating to try to perceive it.

“I ended up looking for intercourse movies,” she explains. “It was a really extensive door that had simply blown open into an entire new world.”

Courtney began off watching sporadically, generally on the weekends or often earlier than college. But then, she says, it changed into nearly every single day.

“That was after I began to grasp that is having a unfavorable impact on me as a result of I’m doing this manner too usually,” she says.

Courtney misplaced her virginity when she was 18 – a second she describes as “horrible”.

“It by no means felt like actual life matched as much as the hype…that I bought from watching porn or masturbating,” she says.

Courtney finally realised that she had an unhealthy dependency on porn.

“I’d all the time discover myself preventing whether or not I may truly cease and it might actually simply depart me feeling so powerless,” she stated.

She stopped watching porn in her early 20s and determined to turn out to be celibate. Along along with her fiancé, they’ve dedicated to abstinence till after their wedding ceremony.

For Shaun, his extreme porn behavior led to him being “exhausted” from masturbating.

“I believe the position that it [porn] needed to play was that it distorted my sense of self, and gave me a dysmorphia round intercourse, or my physique, or my penis,” he says.

However, consultants say it is very important recognise that, for many individuals, it’s doable to have a wholesome relationship with porn. For some, there might even be advantages.

For instance, analysis carried out by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) means that porn offers a manner for younger folks uncertain of their sexuality to know themselves higher.

‘’We should do not forget that an unhealthy relationship with porn solely happens when the person has misplaced the facility of alternative; they can not perform usually of their everyday lives with out watching porn,” concludes Fernandes.

“We would urge anybody who thinks they fall into this class to hunt skilled assist.”

“It’s left me with a variety of unlearning to do,” says Courtney. “I’ve needed to be taught what practical intercourse was.

“I’ve needed to be taught to like my physique and never examine it to different girls’s our bodies.

“I’ve needed to be taught to like and never objectify folks, women and men. And not simply see them as sexual objects, however truly see them as folks.

“If I may rewind the clock, I would not have began it.”

For Shaun, giving up is among the “finest selections” he’s ever made.

“The habit made me lose connections and now I’m making an attempt to be linked to those that I usually love and I actually care about,” he says.

Additional reporting by Michelle Barratt and Fiona Paus.

If you may have been affected by the problems raised on this story you may go to BBC Action Line.