The impact of pornography on young people is of national concern, especially given the risks posed by deepfakes and AI. These new technologies have intensified public discourse around online harms and sexual and gender-based violence in Australia. Action is required to address the ways pornography is shaping young people’s digital and sexual lives.
Many Australian teens access and share porn online before turning 18, even though it is technically forbidden. Few raise this with adults in their lives because porn discussions can be embarrassing or uncomfortable. Instead, teens say they want information to help them think critically about pornography, perhaps via classes at school.
This project explores how Australian teens aged 12-17 would like key adults—parents or primary caregivers, and teachers—to help them develop a questioning ‘porn literacy’. It will explore teens’ existing knowledge, what they want to know, how they wish to learn, and from whom.
The project utilises a co-design approach, where teens will engage in creative ideation and feedback workshops to propose responses to pornography, fostering a two-way discussion between teens and researchers. The project also involves separate interviews with teens. This approach ensures that the research is youth-led and youth-focused, while also providing reassurance to adults who seek to support teens’ wellbeing.
This project is funded by the Australian Research Council, project number LP250100343. The research is led by Edith Cowan University conducted in conjunction with The Daniel Morcombe Foundation (DMF), and Sexual Health Victoria and partner investigator, Dr Siobhan Healy-Cullen at Massey University, New Zealand/Aotearoa.
Interested in participating in the research?
If you are a teenager interested in participating in workshops or interviews, please fill out our form: https://eaecu.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eldBjb2MpM9q2nc
What does my participation involve?
If you agree to take part, your participation involves either being part of an interview or a co-design group.
The co-design workshop will occur with other teenagers and the research team. The workshop will take about two to three hours. Participation involves engaging in activities and discussions to help devise solutions and strategies to mitigate any harmful impacts of pornography.
Workshops will be recorded and transcribed, and data will be de-identified so that neither individual participants nor families can be identified. There may also be a graphic representation created of the workshop, with an illustrator present. If participants are depicted in this representation, they will not be recognisable. An honorarium will be paid as a thank you for taking part.
If an interview is preferred, a short interview with a researcher online (or in-person if preferred and able to be accommodated) will take place. The interview will take about an hour to an hour and a half. You will be asked about your views about pornography, pornography education, and sexuality education more broadly. We also invite you to share your views about policy and strategies to minimise negative impact in this area.
Researchers
Professor Lelia Green
Lelia Green has been researching young peoples’ lives online since 2002 and has significant experience in working with adolescents and their parents, both in Australian and in international contexts. Green has authored, co-authored and co-edited many books on children, young people and digital media, including Digitising Early Childhood (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children (Routledge, 2021) and Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Lelia has been a chief investigator on two related Australian Research Council (ARC) Centres of Excellence, six related ARC Discovery Grants, and this current ARC Linkage Project to craft teen-informed porn literacy materials. She is Professor of Communications in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, and a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Her most recent book is The Digital Child: Creating Confident Children (2026, Monash University Publishing).
Dr Giselle Woodley
Dr Giselle Woodley is a sexologist and works as a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research fellow at the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University in Australia. Giselle explores issues pertaining to sexuality, sexual violence, pornography, sexuality education, intimate communications, AI, image-based abuse, digital censorship, and young people.
Giselle is a co-founder of Bloom-Ed (https://www.bloom-ed.org/), a Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) advocacy group, and she is particularly interested in the benefits of RSE and real solutions that work in relation to these issues, which ultimately increase individual wellbeing, support healthy relationships, and reduce sexual violence.
Dr Christopher Kueh
Chris is a design researcher and design strategist. He is currently an Associate Professor of Design at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Trained as a graphic and information designer, Chris dedicates his career to expanding and applying designers' ways of thinking to improve and innovate businesses, organisations, and communities. Chris is also an influential leader in the field of Service Design. He introduced Service Design as a practice in Perth in 2010. Together with other pioneer service designers, Chris has helped to establish a strong practice and research culture in the field. From here, Chris expands design research into healthcare, public health, and wellbeing, extending creative research approaches to understand the community’s lived experience of health. He continues to expand the application of Service Design and Strategic Design to build an effective, meaningful, sustainable, and ethical future.
Dr Sian Tomkinson
Sian Tomkinson is a media, culture, and philosophy scholar based in Perth, Western Australia. Much of her work focuses on intersections amongst gender, meaning-making, and media. Sian is working on projects that engage with perceptions of sex and sexuality, pornography, game design and play theory, and toxicity in digital communities.
Elle Thielke
Elle Thielke is a sexologist and digital communications specialist, and current PhD candidate at ECU. Her PhD explores porn literacy for young people in Australia, collaborating with teens and under-consulted stakeholders, to serve as universal prevention for problematic porn use and other unwanted impacts.
Elle has worked with a diverse range of industries, including advocacy against gender-based violence and LGBTQIA+ spaces, often collaborating with community. She strongly believes in the power of storytelling, harnessing the voices of lived experience through various mediums to advocate for change. She holds a Bachelor of Communications, Digital Media (Deakin University), a Master of Sexology, Professional (Curtin University), and Gottman Couples Therapy Level 1.
Beth McNamara (Daniel Morcombe Foundation)
Beth is a qualified social worker (Hons 1) who lives and works on beautiful Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi & Jinibara country. She has worked in violence prevention for 20 years, specifically in the areas of child sexual abuse and domestic and family violence. A career highlight was working at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, from its inception in 2013 to its conclusion in 2017, as a counsellor and lead policy writer.
As National Education Manager for the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, Beth leads national primary prevention projects to strengthen child safety education. She is also a sitting member of the Queensland Child Death Review Board, which recently completed the In Plain Sight report on early years system responses to child sexual abuse.
Leon Huxtable (Sexual Health Victoria)
Leon Huxtable is a Schools and Community Educator at Sexual Health Victoria. He was awarded a Master of Education (Student Wellbeing) from The University of Melbourne in 2019, and he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Education (Secondary) from The University of New South Wales in 2014. Leon has worked at Sexual Health Victoria since 2022, and was previously a secondary school teacher working in New South Wales and Victoria. His research interests include education around sexual content online, and developing national standards for Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Australia.
Mhairi Underwood (Daniel Morcombe Foundation)
Mhairi is a youth practitioner with over a decade’s experience in working with young people in education, online communities, and youth engagement. She’s passionate about centralising the voices and experiences of young people to create solutions that genuinely work for them. In her work at the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, Mhairi works closely with Young Advisors and subject matter experts in a highly collaborative process to develop educational resources for adolescents, focusing on image-based abuse and pornography. She has worked in classrooms with young people; developed respectful relationships and consent educational programs; lead moderation and safeguarding for the UK’s largest online student community, including focusing on health and wellbeing; and contributed as a student wellbeing expert in the UK to the UPP Foundation’s Student Futures Commission.
Madison Godfrey
Dr Madison Godfrey (they/them) is a researcher, editor, educator, and author working across the areas of creative writing, gender, fandom, and sexology. Their second book, Dress Rehearsals (Allen & Unwin, 2023) was celebrated as one of the best books of 2023 by The Guardian and The West Australian. Madison is a previous recipient of a Creative Research Fellowship from the Forrest Research Foundation and a WA Youth Award for ‘Creative Contributions’ to the state. Their PhD, achieved at Curtin University, was recognised by a Vice Chancellor’s Commendation and the 2023 Niall Lucy Award.
