While parents wonder how to go about making their teenagers understand human sexuality, whether it should be done at home or at school, teens are taking it into their own hands and learning much more than needed from a totally different source – the Internet.
It is a known fact that minors and teenagers spend hours online. What is it that most of them do online? Statistics show that about 40 percent of them visit x-rated sites that show explicit content, either accidentally coming across the sites or being led to those sites.
Teenagers today are targeted with salacious junk, from MTV, to video games to the internet. There is simply no way they can escape all the trashy pictures literally thrown at them, and it is as simple as typing the word “sex” on the Internet to be lead to hundreds of hard-core porn sites. It is estimated that more than 40 million Americans visit an estimated one million porn websites each year. As disconcerting as this may sound, this is not the main cause of worry. The concerning factor is the impact this ease of access has on kids and teenagers, for whom porn has become just part of the culture now.
Researchers have found that there is a typical pattern to teens entering these cyber-porn villages. It usually starts on a day when the parents are away and teenagers being inquisitive in nature search for a little porn. Searching for one, they find thousands of sites that can gratify their curiosity. Then they end up registering at some of the sites. This is how it starts and then they are hooked for life.
Sometimes, what starts off as innocent chatting in a chat room also takes these unsuspecting and innocent teens to the sugar-coated chat of pedophilics. Shockingly, to make things scarier, there are said to be several pedophilics hanging around on the internet, that trap teenagers into cyber sex. These child trappers even go to the extent of asking for nude pictures of the children. In fact, they entice children into doing what they want by rewarding them with on-line cartoon CDs or some such things that they know kids and teenagers find irresistible.
Almost all clinical psychologists agree that this could mess up teenagers’ attitudes about sexuality and any relationships they enter into in the future. Teenage years are very impressionable and teens may learn to view women without respect and only as sex objects, and kinky and extreme sex will seem normal, which is detrimental to their emotional health.
There is a real-life example that shows how porn can destroy lives. For Charlie, who was imprisoned for 12 years for sexual assault, it all started as a teenager, when he was hooked to porn. A person on his paper route showed him pornographic material and he found that totally interesting and went back to see more. After a while, the pictures did not satisfy this teenager and the need to act on what he was seeing became impossible to control. That urge is what led him to the sexual assault that nearly destroyed his life. However, he is one in a million who understands what went wrong with him and now speaks against porn and states that it is no coincidence that about 90% of the sex offenders who are in prison used pornography extensively as teens or young adults.
Cyber sex is known to be a psychosocial hazard, and once addicted; it is extremely difficult to escape this porn racket. With the accessibility and quantity of porn available online, the likelihood of porn-addiction is very high. Experts believe that this subject should be looked into seriously, because once it becomes an addiction for a teen, it is for life.
There are several help centers online, where parents are told to teach religious and moral values to their children and the consequences of an immoral life should be explained to the teenagers. Without these moral guidelines, experts believe that these kids are just sitting ducks for the enemy. When they get unsolicited sexual innuendo in email, they should be able to say “That’s wrong and I shouldn’t do that,” because they have a sense of right and wrong. This should be done before the world totally infects their minds and pillages them of any kind of moral values. This is the only way to help teens ignore the glitter that draws them to cyber porn.
This may sound scary and many parents may not even imagine that all this goes on online, and blindly choose to believe their innocent children can do no wrong. Experts say that this innocence of children is taken advantage of by the unscrupulous elements online. Since it is almost an impossible task to stop those monsters that are after children, parents have a much bigger role to play in keeping the children safe.
