True Defense: 5 Ways To Protect Your Child From Cyber-porn

Cyber-porn is electronic pornography readily accessible via the internet. Cyber-porn can be addictive and can lead any person out of control. Estimates suggest that 1 in 5 internet addicts are engaged in some forms of on-line sexual activity—primarily viewing cyber-porn. Researchers found that 98.9 percent of the cyber-porn images consumers are males.  Women do participate in bulletin boards and chat rooms.

Cyber-porn is definitely big business. It is very popular in that it has become a multimillion-dollar business.  Look for a website that’s in the black (profitable) and, most probably, its contents and company are distinctly blue (pornographic).  Nearly 3/4 of the sexually explicit pictures surveyed originally came from adult bulletin-board systems trying to entice customers to add collections of cyber-porn. There and then, they can charge regular monthly fees and get credit card numbers for individual images. The five largest adult systems have yearly revenues in excess of $1 million.

There are multitudes of pornography on-line. Within an 18-month study, researchers found an abrupt swelling surge of sexually explicit images, stories, descriptions, and clips. On the Usenet newsgroups where these digitized images are stored, they found that 83.5% of the pictures were pornographic. Sexually explicit forums are the most-visited popular sites on-line.  Researchers obtained records of internet users and they found individual participants in at least 2000 cities, in all 50 states, and in 40 nations all over the world. Cyber-porn is ever-present and here to stay.

Facts on Cyber-porn

• About 75 percent of internet pornography originated in the USA.  Approximately 15 percent originated in Europe.

• It is estimated that around 70 million people a week visit porn websites. Around 20 million of users come from United States and Canada.

• A study revealed that during a recent one-month period, Germany had the largest audience for on-line porn in Europe, followed by France, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy.

• In Germany, cyber-porn users spend an average of 70 minutes every month browsing porn sites.

• Among European viewers, 50 years old and above spend most time linked to adult websites.

• 70 percent of internet pornography traffic happens during the day.

• It is estimated by some that 100,000 internet sites display materials related to child pornography.

Who are the most vulnerable people for this cyber-porn? People who suffer from a distorted body image, low self-esteem, sexual dysfunction, and a former sexual addict are more at risk to develop addictions to cyber-porn.  In particular, sex perverts often turn to the internet as the safest and latest sexual outlet to fulfilling their underlying compulsive addiction.

Damage to Children

Sadly, many young children also frequently visit internet websites without their parent’s knowledge. In fact, more than 2-in-5 children have subscribed to online services or to a web site even though nearly 85% of parents have rules against doing so. The major shock is the fact that a very large number of children will be going on-line for only one reason—to view pornography. Many viewers of cyber-porn are children and minors who are forbidden by law from procuring pornographic materials or from renting pornographic videos, but can gain ready access to these at home with a few mouse clicks and the choices are endless.

Statistics show that the major participants of cyber-porn are boys between the ages of 12 and 17. For many, pornography is their main source of sexual awareness and education. This has a very alarming consequence in that teen sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and pregnancy are completely nonexistent in porn; which gives a wrong belief that there are no adverse consequences to behaviors portrayed in cyber-porn.

Some researchers showed that exposure to pornography can potentially affect the normal development of a child’s brain. Health-based neurological observations about the instinctual brain-imprinted response to pornographic sights and sounds indicates that viewing porn is a biologically important event overriding informed consent—this is harmful to children's ‘moldable’ plastic brains as it compromises their grasp of reality; thus affects their physical and mental health, their pursuit of happiness and wellness of being.