Early last year a troubling report came out of the UK: The National Analysis of Police-Recorded Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Crimes Report stated that British school children, ages ten to 17, committed more than 6,800 rapes in a year. An average of 18 rapes each day.
In addition, “There were 8,020 sex attacks plus 15,534 cases of indecent images of a child relating to the sharing of naked pictures,” according to the Daily Mail. More than half of all child sexual offences in Britain are now committed by other youngsters.
The U.S. can hardly claim any moral high ground on this score.
The FBI reports that 22% of rape incidents committed between 2019-2020 were perpetrated by offenders aged 10-19. Throughout the past 10 years, juveniles have been the largest age demographic to have committed rape offenses.
It’s horrific to contemplate and almost impossible to believe. What could possibly account for children so young engaging in such wicked and depraved behavior? These aren’t hardened criminals with long histories of escalating violence. These are (mostly) boys who have just barely entered puberty.
To UK law enforcement authorities, the explanation is clear: “Sexual violence has become ‘normalised behaviour’ [sic] for some schoolchildren after years of watching hardcore pornography on their phones.”
Within a generation, we’ve moved from hiding adult magazines behind brown paper wrappers to protect young eyes, to handing devices to our children that give them instant access to every form of deviant pornography the human mind can devise.
Eighty percent of American kids will be exposed to pornography between 12 and 17 years of age, according to a 2016 study by the Barna group. And according to a survey by Common Sense Media, a majority of teens who indicated they have viewed pornography have been exposed to aggressive and/or violent forms of pornography. This includes 52% who reported having seen pornography depicting what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain.
The tragedy of it is that in many cases, the child didn’t seek it out – they stumbled across it by accident. That same Common Sense Media survey found that more than half of respondents (58%) said they encountered pornography accidentally. For many of those children, it’s a piece of their innocence and childhood stolen from them in an instant that they will never be able to get back. For many more, it will start them down a dark path of dopamine-seeking behavior that can lead to addiction.
Teen brains are most sensitive to dopamine at around age 15 and react up to four times more strongly to images perceived as exciting. Teen brains are also highly vulnerable to addiction and rewiring because they are not yet finished developing. Repeated exposure also dulls the dopamine reaction over time, so habitual users will seek out increasingly explicit and extreme content to get the same dopamine reaction they had initially.
Even for those who don’t become addicted, early exposure to pornography is associated with a host of negative developmental outcomes, including, according to the Institute for Family Studies, “a greater acceptance of sexual harassment, sexual activity at an early age, acceptance of negative attitudes to women, unrealistic expectations, skewed attitudes of gender roles, greater levels of body dissatisfaction, rape myths (responsibility for sexual assault to a female victim), and sexual aggression. Children’s brains are not equipped to process the adult experiences depicted. Early exposure to pornography also increases the likelihood that depression and relationship problems develop.”
Even parents who are trying to do everything right to protect their children online find they are fighting a losing battle: An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that protective filters don’t work on 1 in 3 porn sites kids access unintentionally, and 1 in 10 porn sites they visit on purpose.
The porn industry and its defenders argue that they are producing content by and for consenting adults, and what adults choose to look at in the privacy of their own homes is nobody’s business. But it’s a disingenuous defense, at best. They know well how many children are being caught in their snare, and there is every reason to believe it is intentional: Hook them young, and you have a consumer for life. The porn industry has resisted and fought back against every attempt to limit children’s exposure to sexually explicit material.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court didn’t buy their lies. In a monumental 6-3 ruling this summer in the case of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court upheld Texas’s age verification law sending a clear signal that protecting minors outweighs the industry’s self-serving defenses.
This ruling opens the doors for Congress to pass federal age verification legislation with the SCREEN Act (H.R. 1623/S. 737).
Short for “Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net,” the bill requires websites to verify the ages of American consumers trying to buy or access adult content and would empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce violations as “unfair or deceptive practices.”
With 20 states already enacting age-verification laws and 16 more considering similar measures, momentum for federal action is growing.
In today’s world, telling parents to “just keep kids off devices” is simply unrealistic, especially when schools are increasingly relying on tablets and Chromebooks as pedagogical tools and even the most routine tasks now require a smartphone. When we hand a smartphone or laptop to a child without safeguards, we are effectively placing the entire weight of an adult world on shoulders that are not yet strong enough to bear it.
We must give parents real power to protect their children from content that can distort values, damage development, and leave scars that last a lifetime.
Childhood innocence matters. Developing minds deserve protection. We cannot afford to shrug off the devastating impact of unfettered access to pornography on our children.