To spread awareness about the influence of porn on young people, an expert will be conducting workshops in Dubbo for parents and teachers.

Dr Maree Crabbe says more and more kids have been learning about relationships and sex through pornography.

She will be talking about how to tackle the issue and educate kids about the information they are exposed to online.

"They're absorbing the messages from porn," Dr Crabbe says. "That has very significant implications for consent, gender equality, for respect, and for sexual assault."

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Dr Crabbe is the director of It's Time we Talked, an Australian Violence Prevention Project. She has conducted several interviews with young people and amassed extensive research on the subject.

She says young people are increasingly having their sexual expectations, imaginations and experiences shaped by what they or their partners have seen in porn.

"Most popular pornography includes high levels of aggression, and the aggression is almost always directed towards women [more than 90 per cent] of the time," she said.

"So they're getting really deeply problematic messages about a whole range of issues; gender, consent, power, aggression, bodies, ethnicity, pleasure, and sexual health."

Porn sites have made it to the top 10 most visited websites on the internet, alongside Google and Amazon.

Since the internet is a highly unregulated space, Dr Crabbe says teenagers can easily access millions of pages of deeply explicit and often degrading content.

"Young people are seeing pornography on phones, iPads, PlayStations, laptops, and a number of other devices. The landscape has changed enormously, just in the last 15 years," she said.

What needs to be done?

To combat the issue, raising public awareness is of utmost importance. Dr Crabbe says parents need to have open conversations about pornography and its messages with older kids at home.

She also said schools need to have those conversations with older students as well.

"The adults in young people's lives need to understand these issues and how they can address them with young people," she said.

"At schools, we need to integrate content about pornography into relationships and sex education in schools in age appropriate ways."

The Dubbo Violence Prevention Collective's 'From Violence to Safety' conference will be hosting Dr Crabbe's talk at 9:30am on June 7 in the Dubbo RSL Club.

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