NOOSA, Australia, April 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews) – Another parent has gone public with a story of innocence ripped away from her preteen son after his friend pressured him to view violent pornography on his internet-enabled phone.
“Last week my son told me he had watched something horrible online,” wrote Lizi Patch on the Noosa News website. “Something sexual where the young women involved seemed coerced into an act that was brutal and disgusting, not just to an uninitiated 11-year-old, prone to anxiety, but to anyone with a shred of humanity.”
Patch said her son, struggling to fit in at his new secondary school, was pressured by a classmate into viewing the video because the classmate thought it was “funny.” Afterward, Patch noticed her son becoming quiet and withdrawn, but he didn’t respond to her repeated inquiries as to what was wrong.
Finally, one night, he broke down. “[W]e went into my bedroom and he told me everything,” Patch wrote. “He said he had been horrified watching a short video online but was unable to stop thinking about it. He told me he couldn't ‘unsee’ it, and how he felt his childhood was effectively over. He had not told me anything as he thought I'd be angry with him.”
Patch says she comforted her son as best she could, but both she and her son realize, “you can't go backwards.”
Patch said she was shocked by the violent nature of what her son had seen, and how easy it was to access it.
“I use the internet all the time,” she wrote. “I am very active on social media. I've seen porn – most of us have. But I recognise that this time the internet has crept up and slapped me right in the face.”
Added Patch, “when the mark of fitting in with your mates becomes watching a ‘funny’ video, which is essentially violent porn that changes your world in an instant, then I think we, as a society, need to reassess things.”
Patch’s son is hardly alone in having had his childhood stolen by internet pornography. At 11 years old, he is exactly at the age considered “average” for first time porn exposure.
A recent rape case in the U.K. highlighted the very real dangers of early exposure to porn when a 15-year old boy admitted that when he and a 14-year-old friend tied a 14-year-old girl to a chair, tortured her and raped her, they were re-enacting scenes he had witnessed in violent online pornography. The boy told the court he had viewed hours of violent porn every day for months leading up to the attack.
Another 13-year-old boy in Alberta, Canada pled guilty to repeatedly raping his 4-year-old foster brother. He said he got the idea from watching “gay porn” on the home computer.
A recent U.K. study reported that nearly 5,000 children in that country, some as young as five, committed sexual offenses between 2009 and 2012, inspired by graphic sexual imagery that is easy to find online.
“We know that technology and easy access to sexual material is warping young people’s views of what is ‘normal’ or acceptable behavior,” Claire Lilley, policy adviser at Britain’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), told the Telegraph.
Patrick Trueman, president of Morality in Media, told LifeSiteNews last month, “Child-on-child sex abuse and rape is a growing problem in every culture where pornography flourishes.”
“Children act out what they see. If they see acts of love and charity, they will mimic those,” Trueman said. “But when they see sexual violence, domination, rape, and other similar acts so commonly depicted in modern-day pornography, as today's children do, they will act out those, as well.”