‘I watched porn morning, noon and night’

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‘I watched ***** morning, noon and night’

BBC

Shaun Flores shares his story in a new BBC iPlayer series

Shaun Flores was 11 years old when he first started watching *****, after being introduced to it by a friend.

“I was hooked almost immediately,” the now 30-year-old says.

“It was just like, wow, what is this that people are doing where they look like they’re just having the time of their lives.”

Shaun’s curiosity quickly turned into something that he found difficult to stop.

He describes watching ***** morning, noon and night, saying it became as “common as brushing your teeth”.

Shaun has shared his story in a new

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“I realised there was an issue when I had no energy to do anything,” he says. “I didn’t want to play football, I just wanted to be inside.

“But there was the guilt and the shame that came with it, and no matter what I tried to do, I couldn’t stop watching it.

“That’s when I knew there was something up.”

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

Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 report suggests 29% of *** adults accessed online ***** in May 2024. Additionally, new research from addiction treatment centre, UKAT, suggests that millions of Britons are viewing ************ regularly – with 1.8 million watching daily, some multiple times a day.

According to treatment providers, more people are seeking help for problematic ***** use.

Courtney Daniella Boateng has committed to abstinence after becoming obsessed with ************

Dr Paula Hall, a UKCP-accredited ******* and relationship psychotherapist at The Laurel Centre, in London, specialises in helping people affected by **** addiction and ***** addiction.

“The numbers of clients seeking help with ************ problems at The Laurel Centre have doubled over recent years, as have our requests from health professionals for further training,” she tells the BBC.

Dr Hall explains that they have also seen a growing number of younger people seeking help.

“Ten years ago the majority of our clients would have been married men in their 40s and 50s who were seeking help because their partner had discovered their use of **** workers,” she says.

“But increasingly, our clients are in their 20s and 30s, many of whom are single, who are recognising the growing toll of ***** use on their lives and on their ability to get or maintain a relationship.”

‘Once you start it’s quite difficult to stop’

Lee Fernandes, lead therapist at the UKAT Group, also says the number of people they treat for problematic ***** use has risen “significantly” in recent years.

They now receive multiple enquiries for help from people struggling with their ***** use every single day. Prior to 2020, it was one or two enquiries a week

Fernandes explains that advancements in technology and the subsequent easy accessibility of ***** is making it easier for people of all ages to access ******* content online. He believes his is contributing to the increase in people seeking help that he has experienced.

“It’s not very hard for someone to pull out their phone, go onto a site and look at *****, whether they’re 12 years old or 60 years old,” he says. “It is quite troubling.”

According to Fernandes, other reasons for people watching ***** online include curiosity, boredom, stress relief and lack of ******* satisfaction.

While ***** use might start for these reasons, Fernandes describes it as being “very addictive”.

“It fulfils that dopamine reward system,” he explains. “Once you start it’s quite difficult to stop.”

‘************ is no longer confined to dedicated ****** sites’Getty

However, while problematic ***** use might mimic an addiction, it isn’t diagnostically recognised as such.

Instead, it is categorised as problematic online ************ use (POPU), or compulsive behaviour.

For people who develop this relationship with *****, the effects can be negative.

And for the youngest in society who are growing up with free, ********* content at their fingertips, the impact of early overexposure can be far reaching.

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

Recent research from their office found that, in 2023, 10% of children had seen ***** by the age of nine and 27% had seen it by age 11.

“Young people tell me their exposure to ************ is widespread and normalised – with the average age at which children first seeing ************ being 13 years old,” Dame Rachel de Souza, the current Children’s Commissioner, tells the BBC.

“************ is no longer confined to dedicated ****** sites – children tell me they can see violent content, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing ******* acts on social media.

“The implications of seeing this kind of material are vast – my research has found that frequent users of ************ are more likely to engage in physically aggressive **** acts.”

De Souza adds that it is “vital” for high-quality relationship and **** education to be given parity of importance with other subjects to help young people understand that ************ is unrealistic.

Silva Neves, a psychotherapist who specialises in the treatment of compulsive ******* behaviours, agrees that viewing ***** at a young age can have a negative impact.

However, he emphasises that the lack of quality **** education for young people leads to them looking for information elsewhere.

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

“They’re going to see hard ************ lasting for 30 minutes and choking, and all these things, and they’re going to think, ‘ok, so this is ****’.

“But it’s much easier to point the finger at ***** and say ***** is the problem.”

Courtney started watching ***** age nine

Courtney Daniella Boateng, 26, first started watching ***** when she was at primary school.

For her, it was partly driven by the lack of proper **** education available to her. She explains that her classes at school were focussed on the biology of reproduction, rather than the experience of ****.

She says that the ****** that seemed to exist around it made it even more fascinating to try and understand it.

“I ended up searching for **** videos,” she explains. “It was a very wide door that had just blown open into a whole new world.”

‘************ had set unrealistic expectations for me’

Courtney started off watching sporadically, sometimes on the weekends or occasionally before school. But then, she says, it turned into almost every day.

“That was when I started to realise this is having a negative effect on me because I’m doing this way too often,” she says.

Courtney lost her ********** when she was 18 – a moment she describes as “terrible”.

“It never felt like real life matched up to the hype…that I got from watching ***** or *************,” she says.

Courtney eventually realised that she had an unhealthy dependency on *****.

“I would always find myself fighting whether I could actually stop and it would literally just leave me feeling so powerless,” she said.

She stopped watching ***** in her early 20s and decided to become celibate. Along with her fiancé, they have committed to abstinence until after their wedding.

For Shaun, his excessive ***** habit led to him being “exhausted” from *************.

“I think the role that it [*****] had to play was that it distorted my sense of self, and gave me a dysmorphia around ****, or my body, or my ******,” he says.

However, experts say it is important to recognise that, for many people, it is possible to have a healthy relationship with *****. For some, there may even be benefits.

For example, research conducted by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) suggests that ***** provides a way for young people unsure of their sexuality to understand themselves better.

‘’We must remember that an unhealthy relationship with ***** only occurs when the individual has lost the power of choice; they cannot function normally in their day to day lives without watching *****,” concludes Fernandes.

“We would urge anyone who thinks they fall into this category to seek professional help.”

“It’s left me with a lot of unlearning to do,” says Courtney. “I have had to learn what realistic **** was.

“I have had to learn to love my body and not compare it to other women’s bodies.

“I have had to learn to love and not objectify people, men and women. And not just see them as ******* objects, but actually see them as people.

“If I could rewind the clock, I wouldn’t have started it.”

For Shaun, giving up is one of the “best decisions” he’s ever made.

“The addiction made me lose connections and now I’m trying to be connected to people that I generally love and I really care about,” he says.

Additional reporting by Michelle Barratt and Fiona Paus.

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