A grotesque report out of Kansas City recently has drawn attention to a problem that has begun to grow nearly unnoticed: The sexual assault of children—by other children. The Children’s Mercy hospital says that they are seeing “a disturbing trend in child sexual assault cases,” and that pornography has a lot to do with it. Heide Olson, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, noted that the number of offenders between 11 and 15 years of age is unprecedented: “I think [what] was kind of shocking to us all as we were collecting this data, is that almost half of our perpetrators are minors.”
According to the International Association of Forensic Nurses, Children’s Mercy is in the top five percent of hospitals across the United States in terms of the number of sexual assault victims that they treat—in 2017, they saw 444 children who had been sexually abused within the past week. The number of children rises to roughly 1,000 per year when the number of children who report abuse after five days is factored in, and the majority of the victims are little girls between the ages of four and eight years old.
Olson believes that this sort of sexual assault is “a learned behavior,” and according to one local news outlet reporting on the story: “Nurses are finding more and more that pornography is playing a role in these cases. That can include a victim being forced to see porn, a victim reporting that the perpetrator said they’d watched porn, being forced to do something shown in a pornographic video, or a victim being recorded doing a sex act.” Many young perpetrators admit that they are acting out what they have seen in pornography.
Due to children being exposed to pornography at younger and younger ages—Olson stated that it was common for children to see it at as young as four or five years of age—they are imbibing ugly and dangerous ideas about relationships. “We know that it’s probably multi-factorial,” she stated. “I think there are lots of things that contribute to this, but that is the question: How are we, as a society, failing in such a way that we have 11, 12, and 14-year-old boys, primarily, committing violent sexual assaults?”
Rene McCreary, the director of counseling services at the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault, concurs with Olson.
“What we are seeing is more and more kids that have sexual behavior problems and at the same time, more and more children that have access to pornography,” she noted. “Pornography is different today than it used to be. So, 80 percent of the 15-most-viewed films portray women being hit, spit on, kicked, called degrading names. The kinds of behaviors we wouldn’t want our children, or anyone, to act in. Pornography has become more violent.” She says 25 percent of all sex crimes are committed by minors.
This is not the first time that children assaulting children as a result of pornography has made the news. The Economist recently published a report indicating that pornography was spurring children (nearly always boys) to sexually assault other children (nearly always girls), and that experts were calling for access to pornography to be restricted as a result. In the United Kingdom, for example, the police apparently received nearly 40,000 reports of children sexually assaulting other children, including 2,625 alleged instances taking place on school grounds. Pornography is grooming boys to be predators, and girls to be victims.
