In a chilling tale of disassociation and childhood depravity, an eight-year-old hailing from Blackburn, England has admitted to not only raping his sister, but inciting her to perform a sexual act on him.
His explanation? Porn.
The adolescent told the police that after watching some dirty movies on his friend's XBOX he wanted to "try it out." Not surprisingly, this sexual assault has resurfaced what is now a decades-long debate on violent media (T.V., films, video games and otherwise) inspiring real-life savagery – especially in young children who may have an inability to differentiate between reality and fantasy.
“We know that the vast amount of inappropriate, unrealistic and sometimes downright harmful pornography some children are exposed to through the internet can be extremely damaging to young minds.”
Michele Ybarra, researcher at the Center for Innovative Public Health Research explains that a while her findings would never claim causation, there is a decisive link between violent media and violent behavior.
Ybarra and her colleagues carefully examined sexually violent behavior of 1058 American youth aged 14-21, exploring whether there were differences between X-rated material and violent X-rated material that included one person being harmed in some way.
"Violent X-rated material has more of an effect," Ybarra said. "When you look at the rate of those that say yes [to having viewed violent X-rated material], 17 percent who said yes were perpetrators versus 3 percent [who had viewed violent X-rated material and were not perpetrators]."
Ybarra's results were shocking and surprising: Nearly 1 in 10 youths (9%) reported some type of sexual violence perpetration in their lifetime with both boys and girls attempting assault, coercive sex acts and rape ... although it is not until 18 or 19 years that males (52%) and females (48%) are relatively equally represented as perpetrators. The study finds that all perpetrators reported greater exposure to violent X-rated content.
The porn industry in American is a multi-billion dollar jaggernaut saturating every facet of our media consumption from videos to mobile phones. (1 in 5 searches on smartphones are for pornographic materials). The question we're asking ourselves here at Ravishly is how can America alter legislation to not cut into porn profit but actively keep – what should be – innocent eyes from snuff films, shiza film, BDSM, torture porn, etc. etc. etc.
Don't get us wrong. There is nothing – and we mean nothing – wrong with watching porn. It bolsters everything from sexual creativity (lollipops, who knew?!) to sexual exploration (maybe I like women after all) to simply satiating a profound desire. (And we've all been there.)
But. And this is a resounding caveat – children should not have access to these kinds of materials. If we don't begin to more tightly legislate porn's tra la la presence (i.e. it's available everywhere) or parents don't carefully monitor their children's access to the wonderland of twisted wares out there), we run the risk of regenerating new crops of sexual violence with every passing year.
And I think we can all agree that vision is far worse than an awkward "first time."
