"The mother always let her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter take baths together. There was nothing wrong with that as far as she knew. But one day when she stepped into the bathroom to check on her children in the tub, she found her little boy attempting to shove a bath toy into his sister's nether region.
Shocked, she demanded, 'What are you doing?' Her son, rather innocently, responded, 'Well, I saw this on the Internet, and I was just trying to do it.'
The little boy was just one of the millions of children around the world who have viewed online pornography, whether intentionally or unintentionally. A 2008 study found that 93.2 percent of boys and 62.1 percent of girls had seen online porn before age 18. The mean age of first exposure to Internet porn is 14.8 for girls and 14.3 for boys.
There is a coalition of health experts and child advocates who believe Internet pornography is a public health epidemic, and on Tuesday they will voice their concerns in the heart of Washington, D.C.
On July 14, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation will host a briefing titled "Pornography: A Public Health Crisis" in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. The event is open to members of Congress, their staffs, the press and the public, but attendees must RSVP.
A panel of experts will present research demonstrating the various types of harm pornography causes, including violence against women, child sexual exploitation and increased demands for sex trafficking. Some will explain how pornography negatively impacts the developing brains of children and normalizes dangerous sexual behaviors.
In "Sexual Sabotage," author Judith Reisman explains that Alfred Kinsey, once lauded as a scientific pioneer in research on sex, in reality chased "soul-and-body-destroying sexual anarchy."
Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of the non-profit Enough is Enough, has been working for years to make the Internet a safer place for children. It was she who shared the anecdote, gathered from a friend, about the 5-year-old boy in the bathtub, in an interview with WND.
Hughes said she initially joined Enough is Enough in 1994 because pornography had had an impact on her life.
'One of the harms of pornography is that it promotes the rape myth,' she said. 'It promotes, especially through the more violent material where a woman is taken advantage of, that when a woman says no, she doesn't really mean no, she means yes, and that she enjoys being violated and taken advantage of and forced into sexual acts.'
That is what happened to Hughes when she was 22, she revealed. She felt moved to accept a position as the communications director for Enough is Enough to help combat the scourge of pornography.
Within a few weeks of starting, she and her coworkers began to notice hardcore pornographers using online bulletin boards - the Internet was still fairly undeveloped in 1994 - to promote extreme forms of porn, including bestiality, incest, and excretory material. She also saw sexual predators start to talk about and exchange child porn and even baby porn over their computers.
Hughes recalls: 'We went, 'Holy cow! This is huge. These guys are already on top of this technology, and we've got an opportunity to stop it.' So it became my passion, because I really believed, as did our team at Enough is Enough, that we could put together a holistic plan to make sure the Internet was going to be as awesome and amazing as it could be, and keep the criminal elements at bay.'
So Hughes and Enough is Enough became "the voice of Internet safety" in the mid-1990s.
She says a movement was started.
'Protecting our children online and offline from sexual exploitation should be at the top of our list of national priorities,' she wrote.
'Because this is something that is hurting our citizens from within, and it has a major detrimental effect, especially on children, who are our future leaders. We've found that kids who have fallen into the trap of pornography addiction - and it's a large segment of young people - they are having trouble with intimacy.
They are having trouble with any kind of marriage relationship,' she told WND.
Hughes said pornography makes viewers focus on themselves rather than others.
'It's just the opposite of treating other people with dignity and respect," she said. "So that's not good for any culture.'
Hughes contends that the porn epidemic is actually easy to fix compared to some of America's other pressing problems - if only politicians would aggresively enforce federal obscenity laws.
'We don't have to go build a wall in Mexico or spend billions of dollars fighting wars," she said. "This is a war right at home where we have existing laws that would be a really good first step.'
Porn consumption is not a problem only in America. Hughes said she recently spoke to a government leader in Ethiopia. He told her they were having trouble keeping their kids in school because the kids were going to Internet cafes to view porn, much of it originating in the U.S. The Ethiopian kids were getting hooked on porn and refusing to go back to school.
'There's a reason the courts and the Supreme Court have said we have a compelling interest to protect children from this kind of content,' Hughes argued.
'This isn't speech. It's not First Amendment-covered. This is material that is depicting violence in many cases, it is depicting dysfunctional sex acts, it is depicting all kinds of things that are the opposite of wholesome, loving sexual relationships, which is the foundation of family and of marriage and of procreation.'
Because pornography has been shown to lead to sexual violence, sex trafficking and a warped view of sexuality among many children, Hughes called it a drug...." Click here to read more.
