April 20, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Regular readers of this column will know that I have penned tens of thousands of words on the impact pornography has had on our society: The way it is mainstreaming sexual violence inside of romantic relationships; poisoning a generation of young people with vile ideas about sex; creating a spike in child-on-child sexual assaults; devastating the social bonds we depend on for our happiness.
But believe it or not, it is getting worse. As I’ve written before, there is nothing that pornography cannot poison—and now, police in the United Kingdom are warning that young British men between the ages of 18 and 26 are “emerging as a ‘new group’ of online paedophiles after being brought up on a ‘staple diet’ of porn,” according to the Metro UK.
In an interview with the Internet Watch Foundation’s podcast “Pixels from a Crime Scene,” Norfolk Police Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the officer in charge of national child protection, noted that the United Kingdom is the world’s third-largest consumer of child pornography—or, as the Metro put it, “online child sexual abuse.” Exposure to pornography at a young age can often lead men to seek out increasingly perverse versions of porn in their search for novelty (many studies have confirmed that pornography functions like a drug), and now digital pornography is creating a generation of pedophiles—men who are aroused by sex acts with children.
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According to Bailey, these men have become “desensitised” to the digital pornography they initially used, and eventually begin to seek out illegal pornography featuring horrific sex crimes featuring the abuse of children. “They get to the point where there’s no pornographic material that is stimulating to them so then they start to explore what child abuse imagery might look like,” Bailey told the Internet Watch Foundation. “They start getting their kicks from that.”
Bailey is afraid that the problem is going to get a lot worse: “You look at the opportunities that will be afforded by people who are living in poverty to then exploit children to generate income,” and despite the UK’s law enforcement response to child porn being “the best in the world bar none,” it simply will not be enough.” Up to five hundred offenders are being arrested every month, with an estimated 700 children being “safeguarded,” but still the problem continues to grow at a rate that Bailey finds staggering.
“We have got to start being very honest about this,” he told the IWF. “We have got to start debating this more in public. We’ve got to start coming to terms with the fact that there are some appalling things taking place online, that unfortunately the internet is probably the route of most of the evils. We have to start looking at that, and we have to start genuinely asking the question: How much more are we going to tolerate?”
As the Metro noted, Bailey’s warning “comes as the National Crime Agency warns that at least 300,000 people in the UK pose a sexual threat to children as paedophiles look to exploit the coronavirus lockdown.”
Bailey’s question is precisely the one we need to be asking: How much more are we willing to tolerate?
Digital pornography is ravaging society, and it is quite literally transforming ordinary boys and men into sexual predators. Is the so-called “freedom” to arouse oneself to images of people being degraded and abused onscreen worth the price we pay in sexual assaults, victimized children, broken marriages, and ruptured social bonds? Is the fictitious “right” to see girls and women beaten up and abused for sexual pleasure worth the destruction it reaps in human suffering and poisoned souls?
I don’t think so. I think that it is time we ban pornography—and that considering the alternative, that isn’t even a radical suggestion.
Jonathon’s new podcast, The Van Maren Show, is dedicated to telling the stories of the pro-life and pro-family movement. In his latest episode, he interviews FH Buckley to discuss the current political situation in America and how secession could be looming on the horizon. Buckley’s newest book American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, details the current division and high tensions being faced by Americans might just culminate in something we haven't seen since the civil war.
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