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INVOLVED FOUNDER OF THE CHAT, CHRISTY HERSELMAN, HAS GREAT ADVICE ON SAFEGUARDING OUR KIDS AGAINST ONLINE SEX
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t’s been a long busy day: school runs, work pressure, the extra-mural juggle, the homework fight … Susan feels so grateful to have her three children tucked into bed so she can take an hour to catch her breath and enjoy some me-time. On her way down the passage she pops her head into her nine-year-old son’s bedroom and is surprised to see a light shining from under the bedcovers. She smiles, assuming he is reading by torchlight like she used to do after lights-out when she was a child. As she gently pulls back the covers her son jumps in fright, clutching the iPad he had been watching tightly to his chest. It takes some effort to pry the device from his hands and when she does her heart sinks, and bile rises in her throat. The sexually explicit images filling the screen are unlike anything she had ever imagined, much less seen …. Over the eight years since founding The Chat I have heard countless versions of this scenario. It is a parent’s worst nightmare and is becoming more and more common with younger and younger children. The average age a South African child sees pornography for the first time is 10.
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By 14 most have been exposed to online sex in some form and many are viewing porn regularly. The majority of children get their sex education not from their parents or teachers, but from Google and YouTube. And the emerging data on the long-term effects of porn exposure are extremely concerning: It’s violent. About 90% of porn is violent in nature and portrays women enjoying this abuse, teaching young people that consent is optional and girls actually like to be forced. Porn is normalising violent, extreme and often criminal behaviour. It’s addictive. Most porn is viewed by 14 to 17-year-old boys who, during their most formative years, are training their bodies and brains to be aroused and sexually satisfied by an image on a screen rather than another human being.
This is causing many young men to find themselves unable to connect sexually in adult relationships such as marriages. It’s damaging. Before online porn, the number of men in their 20s with erectile dysfunction stood at around 5%. It is currently around 33%. This is a direct result of the vast amounts of porn being consumed by teens and 20-somethings, saturating their minds with extreme and explicit images which damage the wiring of their brains. It’s growing. Online porn is a $97-billion dollar industry and porn sites have more traffic than Netflix, Twitter, and Amazon combined. Child porn and incest are the two most-searched genres on the world’s largest porn site. The porn industry is fed by the sex trafficking industry and the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable.
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