catholicsphere

A new study to be published in this week’s edition of Pediatrics reveals that children and adolescents stumble upon more and more porn on the Internet, despite search filters.

Nearly 42% of all those age 10-17 have seen pornography on the internet — either images or short films. Of those, approximately 66% said that they did not want to see the images or did not seek it out.

Thirty-three percent of boys, and 8% of girls, ages 16 and 17 said that they had actively sought out porn sites.

While filtering software helped prevent unwanted images from popping up, it is not 100% successful at blocking the images, which researchers agreed can be harmful to many in this age group.

University of Chicago psychiatrist Sharon Hirsch said exposure to online pornography could lead kids to become sexually active too soon, or could put them at risk for being victimized by sexual predators if they visit sites that prey on children.

“They’re seeing things that they’re really not emotionally prepared to see yet, which can cause trauma to them,” Hirsch said.

Exposure to unwanted porn could also lead to a deformed perception concerning a healthy sexual relationship, said Janis Wolak, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center.

This exposure leads to all of the wrong lessons about sexual behavior; it can lead to more teen promiscuity, pregnancies, and abortions, as well as life-long problems for many kids.

Parents, if your kids have access to a computer anywhere where their usage cannot be monitored, especially their bedroom, you need to move the computer to a main living space. Also, think about using multiple programs to block popup images, programs, file-sharing and chat software, as well as websites. If you’re worried about your kids disabling the filters or blocks, there are 2 things you need to do … 1) spend more time getting as familiar with technology as your kids are (your ability and understanding needs to be as good as theirs) and 2) install logging software that will track your teens browsing habits.

The best thing to do is to have the computer in a place where you can directly monitor what’s going on on the computer — and even limit the times the internet connection can be accessed, which is also good to make sure they don’t waste too much time online.

Internet pornography is now an immense and lucrative online industry, generating earnings of more than $12 billion- roughly equal to the combined annual revenue ABC, NBC, and CBS. One out of every 8 Internet websites is pornographic, and there are over 400 million pornographic web pages on the net. Over the last eight years, the number of Internet porn sites has increased 30-fold.

In fact, the online pornography is one of the very few industries that is, as a whole, making money in the online world.

Parents need to be diligent, and work needs to be done to make it more difficult for porn sites to do mass-marketing, and generate blocks on delivered content to determine that the recipient is of legal age and desires to view the images. And, parents must talk to each other about these things. Just because you’ve got your computer in the living room, and your children are only allowed to use it at certain times of the day, doesn’t mean that their friends’ parents have implemented the same practices.

For more information on how to keep your kids safe, check out this article on keeping your kids safe on the information highway. It’s not about trust, it’s about protecting your kids. You wouldn’t send them out by themselves in a major city at 1am, so don’t let them go out onto the web without safety measures — its probably more dangerous than sending them into a gang area wearing the “wrong colors”.

[tags]online, pornography, study, teens, children, safety, pediatrics, web, catholicsphere[/tags]