A health unit working with abused and abusive children in this Australian city believes exposure to adult material on the Internet is "a key factor" in increases of sexually aggressive behavior among such children.
A research paper by Canberra Hospital's risk assessment unit and the National Child Protection Clearinghouse, the latter a government-sponsored group, found that parental monitoring of children's Internet surfing was badly enough lacking, and almost 90 percent of the children they studied had had access to porn.
NCPC child protection expert Dr. Janet Stanley even called for tighter government regulation of Internet service providers. "We're suggesting," she told a conference on child abuse, "there's an association between the children's exposure to inappropriate material on the Internet ... and their acting out in sexually aggressive behavior, experimenting and modeling what they're seeing."
The research paper said most of the children who were involved in sexually aggressive behavior and had seen porn online came from troubled backgrounds, with 40 percent of those children having been abused in one or another way, according to Canberra Hospital risk assessment unit manager Annabell Wyndham.
"We're not talking about kids playing mummies and daddies together," Wyndham told reporters. "We're talking about things like one child holding another child up by the neck in the back of a toilet block and pulling their pants down and doing things to them. Children who are doing that sort of thing have to have other things going wrong in their lives. They wouldn't be doing it otherwise."
And the paper said that out of 101 sexually-abusive children tended in the past three years, the hospital unit found almost all of them had online access and about 90 percent of them had seen porn. But only a quarter of them had actively sought online porn, while 40 percent said porn wasn't their main Internet interest.
"We think this is a new thing of the modern world," Wyndham said, "because of access to the Net and - to be truthful -combined with some pretty terrible parenting."
