(LifeSiteNews) — A new study published by the journal Social Sciences revealed, once again, the links “between pornography and the sexual abuse of children.” As the National Center on Sexual Exploitation put it, there are four primary ways pornography use and child abuse are intertwined:

• Social modeling: Children often imitate what they see in pornography, leading to child-on-child harmful sexual behavior. For example, one therapist shared a story of an 11-year-old boy who acted out things he saw in pornography on his 3-year-old brother.
• Normalization: Pornography can make abusive and unrealistic sexual behaviors seem “normal” to children, or anyone who watches it. Many service providers shared that their young female clients experienced being choked during sex, because teenage boys have been taught by pornography that this is standard sexual behavior.
• Grooming: Abusers often show pornography to a child as a way of desensitizing them to sexual abuse.
• Power and threat: Abusers often use pornography to control and manipulate their victims — such as by threatening to disclose a child’s pornography consumption, or to distribute sexually explicit images of the child.

The paper, titled “Child Advocacy Workers’ Accounts of the Connections Between Pornography and Child Sexual Abuse,” was conducted by faculty from New York University, the University of Arkansas, Virginia Polytechnique Institute, and James Madison University.

“Exposure to pornography is nearly ubiquitous for young people in the 21st century,” the authors noted. “The average age of first exposure is early to mid-adolescence, with rates of intentional viewing among adolescents reaching 84%. Pornography consumption can influence sexual attitudes and behaviors in both adolescents and adults. It is, in this context, a normalized component of young people’s gender and sexual socialization.”

Pornography, in other words, is socializing children and minors into an extraordinarily cruel, violent, and degrading ideology of sex that is bleeding into every aspect of life. The study was based on qualitative data from 50 interviews, eight focus groups, and post-interview surveys with professionals experienced in the field.

Interviewees pinpointed children having smartphones as the primary problem. Claire, an executive director of a CAC, noted, “Parents won’t take the phone away … because they’re afraid they’re going to be a ‘bad parent’ … (Y)ou gotta be a parent!” Another educator stated that children frequently stumble across pornography on YouTube, even when looking for innocent content like cartoons: “The parent gets up and they walk around and … the (suggested content) is hardcore, triple-X porn.” The authors’ warning about internet-capable technology is worth quoting in full:

One of the most prominent risk factors highlighted in our interviews focused on children’s un- or under-restricted access to the internet via devices such as gaming consoles, tablets, and smartphones, often without guardians’ awareness. Marie, a forensic interviewer, noted the many Internet-capable devices to which children have access. And Natalie, a mental health clinician, echoed other participants equating modern cell phones with Internet-equipped “mini-computers … that you hold in your hand.” Beyond this, several participants focused specifically on the importance of social media, as Nicholas, a forensic interviewer, pointed out, “Whenever phones came out with the Internet … that also allowed perpetrators to have contact with kids … through Snapchat, … Facebook, things like that.” Angela, a pediatric SANE, agreed: “I can’t tell you the number of kids I’ve taken care of who have met up with (a perpetrator) from social media.”

The study also confirmed previous findings that we have covered many times in this space. “The earlier someone has been exposed to porn, I’ve noticed, the more likely they are to be viewing violent porn currently,” said Natalie, a pediatric mental health clinician. This leads to perverse views of women, girls, and sex more generally.

“It’s not even just like a cognitive decision of like, ‘That’s how we now treat women,’ or, like, ‘That’s how we should be treated as women’ … it is, now, ‘That is how we now derive pleasure,” Natalie said. “So, a guy maybe can’t even perform if it’s not somehow aggressive and violent …. We’re talking, like, truly choking, hitting someone with something, punching, um, holding down, like, that sort of behavior.””

Carly, a sexual assault nurse examiner, saw the same thing — teenage boys turned into predators by pornography. “I think (pornography is) influencing sexual violence and sexual behaviors in so, so many ways,” she said.

The authors advocate for “digitally literate sex education,” trauma-informed responses, and situate pornography as one of the “zones of violence” leading to child abuse, but this is clearly not enough. In the UK, legislators are now finally taking the much-needed step of banning some genres of pornography. Only by cutting off access to this poisonous material will we be able to begin reversing the horrific trends that now define our society for younger generations. Banning pornography is the only way forward.