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With smartphones and tablets becoming like added appendages, the internet, and all the sexually explicit content that comes with it, has never been more accessible to children.

Parents might be shocked to see their kids spend a ludicrous amount of time on their devices – often 10 to 12 hours a day – but they will be absolutely appalled to find out that a majority of South African children are also consuming porn.

A study by Unisa’s Bureau for Market Research’s Youth Research Unit (BMR unit) found that more than half (55%) of young South African children are regularly watching pornography, per City Press.

They also found that at least 10% of them watch videos of sex acts every day.

These figures might even be on the low side, as not all children admit to watching porn, something they might recognise as shameful.

All that is not even the most shocking part of the study:

35% of the children watch child pornography and 30% watch violent pornography.

Nearly 65% also watch pornography between a man and a woman.

They don’t really care that child pornography is illegal.

Kids are also apparently consuming bestiality and hentai pornography.

Dr Antoinette Basson, a psychologist attached to the BMR unit, has been researching children and their use of pornography for more than a decade and says that first exposure is often an accident:

Parents put on a movie for the child and continue working. Then a pop-up appears and the child clicks on it and goes to a pornography website. Or they google something like ‘Barbie doll’ and then they land on a pornographic website. Children are curious and then go further and deeper into the porn site.

Pretoria-based clinical psychologist Marita Rademeyer can corroborate these findings:

The youngest girl I had to work with, who was addicted to pornography, was five years old. She watched pornography and masturbated every day, more than once a day.

She added that by the time children have left primary school, up to 90% of them have already been exposed to pornography.

The problem, besides being exposed to content that could be potentially traumatising, is that children want to mimic what they watch, which is often violent and misguided:

…In more than 40% of cases where children have been sexually abused, including having been raped, the perpetrators are other children – this is so-called child-on-child sexual abuse.

Becoming addicted to porn early on can also make people struggle enormously in their future relationships, as they never quite learn what a loving partnership looks like.

That’s your cue if you’re a parent to go and talk to your kid about their bodies, sex, and pornography in an age-appropriate way.

[source:citypress]