“This may shock us, but it shouldn’t. What else can we expect? The average child gets his first smart phone at the age of 10. That means many kids are getting phones even earlier. Just ask any third grade teacher about all the 8-year-olds coming to class with iPhones.”
(Matt Walsh – The Daily Wire) A local news report in Kansas City should spark the interest of every parent. Children’s Mercy Hospital has noticed a trend in the child sexual assault cases they encounter: half of the perpetrators of these crimes are children themselves. Nurses at the hospital think porn plays a prominent role:
“I think that was kind of shocking to us all as we were collecting this data, is that almost half of our perpetrators are minors,” said Heidi Olson, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Coordinator.
The SANE program’s data shows perpetrators are likely to be between 11 and 15 years-old.
“Another thing we’re noticing is a lot of those sexual assaults are violent sexual assaults, so they include physical violence in addition to sexual violence,” said Jennifer Hansen, a child abuse pediatrician at Children’s Mercy.
…”To sexually assault someone else, that’s a learned behavior,” said Olson. Nurses are also finding more and more that pornography is playing a role in these cases. That can include a victim being forced to see porn, a victim reporting that the perpetrator said they’d watched porn, being forced to do something shown in a pornographic video, or a victim being recorded doing a sexual act.
They also noted that kids are often exposed to porn at extremely young ages:
Hansen and Olson says they’re noticing kids are being exposed to porn at very young ages, around 4 or 5 years-old. They say a child can develop unrealistic and dangerous ideas about intimate relationships by being exposed to violent, graphic porn.
“We know that it’s probably multi-factorial. I think there are lots of things that contribute to this, but that is the question; How are we, as a society, failing in such a way that we have 11, 12, and 14-year-old boys, primarily, committing violent sexual assaults?” Hansen said.
SANE nurses can’t always identify who a perpetrator is, because they work with victims, but said they’ve had young perpetratros tell them they’ve watched pornography and acted it out on someone else.