How Porn Puts our Children at Risk

by CNS · June 25, 2019

Easy access to porn on the Internet has turned even young teen boys into sexual abusers. The good news is: these young offenders can be treated.

Easy access to pornography on the Internet is distorting young people’s views of sex, which can even lead to rape, as Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan reports.

The Internet facilitates sexual exploitation, a category of child abuse, according to experts in this field.

The Internet also, they say, enables near-universal access to violent pornography, with a range of negative implications. These include the normalising of sexual aggression, and a dramatic increase in children abusing other children.

Vanessa Bouche, a political science professor at Texas Christian University, found the Internet facilitated prostitution, through online ads, in 75% of the cases.

This is stated in a recent report on the role of technology in sex trafficking by the US Justice Department’s Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking studies. It is based on interviews with 260 survivors.

The average age of entry was 15. Young victims, from under one years old through age ten, were exploited by family members (76%), while older minors were exploited by members of their social network or strangers, far more often than by family.

According to Mary Anne Layden, director of the sexual trauma and psychopathology programme in the University of Pennsylvania’s psychiatry department, our society is at the point of “almost universal exposure” of children to pornography, which gives them “massive mis-education about intimacy and sexuality”.

Children “learn that sex is non-intimate, violent, adversarial, that it is non-relational, it is degrading and it is narcissistic”, she told Catholic News Service.

“Almost 90% of pornography coded by researchers is violent, so boys are being taught: Women like to be forced, women like to be raped” or physically abused during sex.

Women are depicted as enjoying, or having a neutral response, to maltreatment.

“Everything pornography says is a lie, but it is a massively effective teaching tool — of toxic learning,” Prof Layden explained.

Porn is traumatic

The US Catholic bishops addressed these harmful effects on children in their 2015 pastoral letter on pornography, “Create in Me a Clean Heart”.

“Being exposed to pornography can be traumatic for children and youth. Seeing it steals their innocence and gives them a distorted image of sexuality, relationships, and men and women, which may then affect their behaviour,” the US bishops wrote.

“It can also make them more vulnerable to being sexually abused, since their understanding of appropriate behaviour can be damaged.”

One result of exposure to this violence of pornography is an “explosive” increase in children who are assaulting other children.

Prof Layden said it is more likely for a daughter to be assaulted by her brother than by her stepfather in a “blended” household.

Dawn Hawkins concurs with Prof Layden. Ms Hawkins is senior vice-president and executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).

“NCOSE believes the increase in children with ‘harmful sexual behaviour’ — a term that includes rape — is due to early exposure to hard-core porn,” she said.

Ms Hawkins said there’s little data, for one reason, why in school settings sexual abuse between children is not reported, but the damage to victims is real.

The lawyer for an 8-year-old girl, who was raped multiple times by a 13-year-old male neighbour, consulted NCOSE recently. The boy was a consumer of violent pornography.

A data set released in late 2018 by Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, found that in almost half of its 2017 child abuse cases, boys aged 11-15 years were the perpetrators, physically and sexually attacking girls between 4-8 years old. Nurses traced the phenomena to exposure to pornography.

“We know child sexual abuse leads to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, self-harm, PTSD, risky sexual behaviours, poor physical health and other difficult struggles,” summarised Ms Hawkins.

“It often predates an individual’s entry into prostitution,” she added. “So the trauma experienced by that group of children — caused by an immature brain’s exposure to pornography — could take years, even decades, to unravel.”

Treatment for abusers

One potentially positive note in the disturbing trend regarding peer assault is that, unlike adult perpetrators, young offenders who receive treatment do not appear to re-offend into adulthood.

Ms Hawkins is excited that after “many meetings” with Google, the Internet giant has quietly added a “safe search” feature, allowing a setting that automatically screens out graphic sexual imagery from popping up.

Private companies as well are beginning to respond to evidence of the harmful impacts of pornography and to US law enforcement crackdowns on it.

The social networking site Tumblr has blocked all pornography and “adult content” from its site since December 17.

And coffeeshop franchise Starbucks in the US announced it would block customers from perusing pornography while on the shops’ free WiFi.

Some of these changes are a result of consumer pressure, according to Ms Hawkins.

“The general public is becoming more aware of the public health harm,” she said. “Parents are concerned about the harm to their young kids.”

Ms Hawkins recommends the website protectyoungminds.org, for guidance on inoculating youngsters from harmful imagery online. Another such site, and Catholic, is www.faithandsafety.org—CNS