"Gripping my office desk, I read the messages landing in my inbox. ‘I’m 14, and my boyfriend wants anal in a car park while people watch.’
‘I’m scared to get strangled but everyone else is doing it.’
‘Sex always hurts and my boyfriend doesn’t care.’
During almost every shift as an online sex and relationships adviser for young people, a teenage girl would write in, confused and upset after she’d been pressured, coerced or forced into having sex. In particular, to have rougher and more violent sex – like the sex they said the boys were watching in online porn. I had known from my training that sexual violence would come up, but I never expected the onslaught. On a bad shift, at least half the messages would involve sexual violence. What was especially upsetting was these girls rarely realised they had just described a rape to me – they just saw non-consensual, degrading and painful sex as a ‘normal’ part of their lives.
That’s what broke me in the end – the girls not realising. That they were feeling ashamed, confused and upset not due to a muddled sexual encounter, but because a horrific crime had been committed against them. It was worryingly evident what early exposure to hardcore porn was doing to this generation."
These are the words of Holly Bourne, a best-selling British author who has several critically acclaimed novels to her name – all of them in the category of youth fiction. She is also a whistleblower, and in a recent column for the Daily Mail, Bourne details how ubiquitous porn use among young people is creating a toxic rape culture that makes life unbearable for teenage girls.
What she tells us about the full reality of a generation raised on a diet of sexual violence is sickening.
Bourne says that after just a few years as a counselor working with young people, she was “permanently angry, emotional, and distrustful of men,” a “shell of the person I was before, one who needed counselling myself.”
Six years from that moment, however, “things have got far worse for young people.” She is correct. Despite overwhelming evidence that pornography is being viewed by children and that the impact of porn on children is incredibly poisonous, we have collectively declined to do anything significant to keep porn away from children. Despite some attempts at age verification and a growing consensus that porn is a social evil, the scale of the damage has not yet resulted in laws banning the rape culture pipeline.
Now, Bourne says, “the widespread consumption of hardcore pornography is now a public health emergency.”
Sadly, she is absolutely right. So what can parents do about it. First, understand that such material is precisely what ALL your boys and many of your girls will be shown, and will watch, at far younger ages than you may have encountered soft-porn mags when you were their age.
You must talk to them about it, and you have an absolute duty to at least try to control it and to protect them. At the ideal maximum, withdraw your family from the online world completely. The Amish are right.
At the bare minimum, sit them down and explain that what they are seeing is NOT reality, not normal and not healthy. And talk to other parents of their peers about the problem too. This is woefully inadequate, but it is better than the complete betrayal that is doing nothing and hoping the problem will go away.
Second, do some research into exactly who is responsible for this online deluge of destructive, literally Satanic poison. It is one of the keys to understanding the reality of the 21st Century Sodom in which we currently live. And understanding is the first step to wisdom and to the long road back.