Posted on 07/21/2014 11:58:26 AM PDT by Morgana
I never thought it would happen to me. I’m technologically savvy, hyper-vigilant about parental controls, and frequently check the search and browser histories of my kids’ electronic devices. As a writer for LSN, I’m more aware than most people of the filth that’s out there and the harmful effects it can have on a developing brain (not to mention a developing soul). So that’s why I was surprised and heartbroken the day I discovered my ten-year-old son had been watching hardcore pornography on his iPhone.
It was the first day of final exams. At the bus stop that morning, my son suddenly tossed me his phone. “Hey, I forgot, I can’t have this at school during testing week,” he said. “Can you go put it on the charger for me?”
As I caught the device, I realized that it had been a couple of weeks since I had checked his searches. With a busy senior in the house cramming for her AP exams and getting ready for prom, a fourth-grader frantically trying to bring up his Geography score after a failed state capitals test, and a kindergartener whose math homework consists of the sort of activities that eat up an hour of your night (Make a cutout of your foot. Use it to measure every room in your house in “feet.” No, I did not make that up), it had simply slipped my mind.
And I really felt I had no reason to worry – previous spot checks of his search history had turned up things like “what is the worst tasting drink in the world,” “why are farts so awesome,” and “giant ship from star trek into darkness.” This is a boy who blushes at the mere mention of the girl he likes, and who I was pretty sure was in danger of fainting the first time she grabbed his hand to hold. So, what I was expecting to find in his search history was a peek into the mind of an innocent and slightly geeky ten-year-old boy with an affinity for fart jokes.
What I found was a lot darker than that. As soon as I brought up the history, my stomach sank. The search terms told the story in stark, broken phrases – most of which I can’t even print here because they’re too explicit.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said, between gasping sobs. “I wish I had never seen any of those things. I can’t get them out of my head. I want them out of my head. I don’t know what to do.”
It all started innocently enough – he apparently searched for an “underwear mod for Minecraft,” presumably because he thought it would be hilarious to see Steve walking around in his underpants. That seemingly innocuous search obviously brought up tangentially related results he wasn’t prepared to see, and his search terms quickly shifted in a more disturbing direction. “Naked people.” “Naked boys.” “Naked men.” “What is gay?” The browser history was even worse – search terms like that naturally led him straight to the bowels of the internet – including a porn video that traumatized me just by reading the title. I didn’t have the heart to watch it, but knowing my little boy probably had – I was shattered.
My heart broke for him as I realized what must have been going on in his innocent young mind. It all started with a relatively innocent search, and his curiosity took him from there. Unfortunately it took him to places he never wanted to go, and he was left wondering about his own sexuality just because he’d stumbled across some naked pictures on the internet.
When he got home, I sat him down and confronted him, gently, about what I’d found. He instantly broke down in tears, heaving sobs of the kind I hadn’t seen him cry since he was small enough to climb up onto my lap for comfort. At five feet-plus and 75 pounds, lap-sitting wasn’t an option, so I just gathered him into my arms and held him until he was calm enough to speak. What he told me broke my heart all over again. Advertisement
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said, between gasping sobs. “I wish I had never seen any of those things. I can’t get them out of my head. I want them out of my head. I don’t know what to do.”
We talked for a long time. I told him that what he had seen wasn’t normal, wasn’t real sexuality. I explained, for the first time, in explicit but appropriate terms, exactly what sex is and what it is for, and that it’s something God wants us to save for marriage so that all the babies who come from sex will have moms and dads to love them and raise them. I asked him if he thought he was gay. He said he didn’t know. I pointed out that all his crushes have been on girls, and that seemed to reassure him. I told him it was normal to be curious about people’s bodies and about sex, but that if he ever has questions, he needs to ask me or his dad, not Siri or Google.
He begged me not to tell his father – he was so sure he would be angry. I promised him he wouldn’t be. (My husband has had his own struggles with pornography in the past, and I knew he, of all people, would be sympathetic while also being able to convey just how damaging porn can be. Later that evening, they went for a walk and had their own long talk. It seemed to help.)
I told him that he was absolutely not in trouble, but that I would be taking his phone away until I could figure out how to protect him from ever seeing those things again.
It turns out that in iOS7, you can block explicit searches, so I upgraded his software from iOS6 and activated the stricter parental controls. (He has an iPhone 4S and hadn’t previously wanted to upgrade out of concerns about possible performance issues. That hasn’t been a problem, FYI. iOS7 runs fine on the older device.) I also installed a new browser on the phone that sends me daily reports of every site he’s visited, and double checked that his laptop computer’s safety controls were similarly up to snuff. (The laptop, surprisingly, has not been a problem – it turns out it’s much easier to control what he can access there than it is on a phone.)
Finally, I told my son that for at least a little while, I’d require him to be in the physical presence of a parent in order to use any internet-connected device, just so we can keep an eye on him and make sure he’s safe. To my surprise, he was absolutely fine with that – he seemed comforted, even.
The last thing I did was hand him a copy of The Boy’s Body Book. I explained that his body and feelings are about to start changing in big ways, and that the book would help him know what to expect. I told him we could read it together, or he could read it on his own, but that I would always be available to answer any question he has about sex or his feelings, and I will always tell him the truth, and he’ll never be in trouble for asking.
It’s been a little over two months now, and all is well. He’s gradually earned access back to his devices, although, I still require him to be in a public area while using them. I doubt he’ll go looking again for naked people for a long, long time. Advertisement
That doesn’t mean I won’t keep constant vigilance, though. I’ve learned my lesson.
For a good introduction to keeping kids safe online, check out “How to Childproof the Internet” at PCWorld.
Note: Abby Moore is a pseudonym for a LifeSiteNews writer who wishes to protect her family's anonymity.
His mother was understandably upset and then irate. When her husband came home from work, she showed him what their son had been “searching” for and told him that they both needed to 1) have a long talk with their son, 2) punish him if he tried lying about it and 3) take away all computer (unless closely supervised and for homework only) and all video game privileges. Her husband agreed but did tell his wife that he was at least somewhat relieved his son was searching for naked women and not something worse.
The both confronted my nephew and at first he tried to deny it; “I don’t know what you are talking about”, “It wasn’t me”, “I didn’t do it”. But then he finally broke down and admitted that he had searched for those sites. However, in his defense, he told them; “I didn’t really see much. All those sites wanted a credit card to really see the nasty stuff. It’s really kinda like false advertising”.
And later that night she and her husband followed the cached web browser links prior to deleting them and sure enough, while there were racy, semi-naked, very suggestive pictures on the sites’ home pages, they couldn’t get past at least the home pages on the sites he had searched and clicked on without entering a credit card number.
FWIW, I’ve been using the internet since the early 90’s; regularly, for work, for research on all sorts of topics that interest me or for further research sometimes on FR articles and sometimes just for my random entertainment and being a woman in her 50’s, living alone with no children, I don’t have parental controls or filters on my internet browsers or on my ISP and while I have certainly never purposefully searched for porn and I’m not about to anytime soon, but perhaps more importantly, I’ve never accidently come across any hard core porn sites while doing an internet search and believe me, I’ve probably searched up some rather weird, albeit not specifically pornographic terms, that I would have thought after the fact, might have. I really don't get the "One day I innocently searched for zucchini recipes and suddenly found myself on a hard core porn site.”
It ain’t “Naked women” it is full hard-core porn
Tax chick...you were drunk???? haw haw haw haw hawwww!
Anyway, his was MORE inane and MORE stupid!
mesmerizing.... hypnotizing....
So you don’t think someone could, as an example, type in whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov?
If you search for anything relating to “teens” you will likely get all kinds of porn in the search results.
Hopefully they blocked the Bestiality websites too
You are so right she should be bathing with him and stuff, right?
What does that supposed to mean?
That only Christians have a problem with kids viewing hard core porn?
Or that mommy should SHOW HIM what its about in person?
Yes, exactly.
I have one better! You know the wildlife videos that show animal mating rituals?
This is my personal fav!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcBKJ9VH37o
So sue me I always wondered how they did it.
“What does that supposed to mean?....”
You’ve never been to a farm have you Gerry?
Not what I was referring to.
First it was an attack on Christians and a sideways defense of kids watching porn.
Not funny at all.
I’m not even going to bother pinging the perv
Nor do I. The "He has an iPhone 4S" kind of jumped off the page at me. The best parental control? Get rid of that damned iPhone. A 10 year old doesn't need it.
I’ve seriously known parents to over react when seeing animals do the nasty. I just found that kinda funny. Animals are doing what comes natural when it comes to reproduction of their species. Humans however think it’s something to do in public for all the world to see and that all of want to see it. We have perverted the life giving act.
Probably ... I have good grammar even when I'm smashed.
The boy’s curiosity about homosexuality is probably triggered by what he’s taught in school, and that’s if he’s not being personally targeted by one.
Ten is a little young to be interested in naked girls, even ... seems like 13-ish with my sons ... but interest in homosexuality is deliberately programmed by sick adults.
“Ten is a little young to be interested in naked girls, even ... seems like 13-ish with my sons ... but interest in homosexuality is deliberately programmed by sick adults.”
Exactly what I’m thinking.
On a hunch I actually googled “naked men” and 9 out of 10 hits were gay related. A few were news-related articles. I think this Mother missed something in that search. She thinks he was just looking for porn/nude pics. I’m wondering after just what I found what he was really looking for.
Well, he wasn’t exactly searching for “girl on girl action” or “5 guys “doing” one girl” or “two girls one cup” (and you really don’t want to search that one up, trust me), he must have seen the late night TV commercial for “Girls Gone Wild” and thought, “I’d like to see more of that” – i.e. smoking hot looking girl’s boobies that they blurred out on the TV commercials, and FWIW, what normal hetero boy on the cusp of puberty wouldn’t? Not saying that that is something to be encouraged, but boys will be boys.
But FWIW, aren’t you the guy who I’ve seen make posts in the past that equates merely pictures of women in bikinis as also being pornographic? So forgive me if I have a hard time trying to keep up with what you think is actually pornographic or mistaking you for a prude.
So you don’t think someone could, as an example, type in whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov?
So I put in whitehouse.com and yes, clicking on the site came up with a list of links, ads actually to and for other websites that for obvious reasons I will not click on but none of them could ever be mistaken for whitehouse.gov nor would most kids mistake it for whitehouse.gov unless they think “Meet Local Cheating Wives” is a government web site devoted to fight against the “republican” war on women and “Sylk Vaginal Lubricant” is part of Healthcare.gov and “Ukraine Women For You” is a State Department outreach program in response to the crisis in the Ukraine. FWIW, that search also brought up as the second result a wiki article about Whitehouse.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse.com
and the third result was Whitehouse.gov.
I don’t know, I’d almost rather my teenage son was looking up “hot naked co-eds” and “girls gone wild” rather than the bile posted on whitehouse.gov under this administration. At least the “girls gone wild” are making a living selling what at least some people actually want and not confiscating my tax dollars in order to do so.
If you search for anything relating to “teens” you will likely get all kinds of porn in the search results.,
So based on your suggestion I put into an unfiltered Google search the word “teens”.
https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=nw#hl=en&q=teens
OK some of those sites, those on on teen “health” and sexuality, STD prevention, etc. are not sites I’d necessarily want my young teenager, if I had one, to search up without my knowledge and my pre-screening and guidance, but it’s hardly what I’d call “full hard core porn”.
Oh and just out of curiosity I “googled” the term “vagina”
https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=nw#hl=en&q=vagina
You might think that “googling” that word would bring up a treasure trove of porn but aside from the racier link to Cosmo magazine, which BTW is available at most grocery store checkout counters, all the other links were to medical websites and unless you get your jollies off by reading articles about vaginal dryness after menopause or viewing anatomical drawings that any 1st year med student would, it’s hardly what anyone or at least any normal person could or would call “full hard-core porn”.
My point is it is really not all that easy to accidently bring up by just an innocent web search completely by accident, a truly hard core porn site unless you put in some rather specific search terms and or you don’t pay any attention to the rather obviously pornographic and adult links that “may” come up and can be easily avoided. And this is why any kid, rather than be totally cut off from the internet, should be taught some basics on what sort of links never to click on along with setting parental filters good parental supervision.
Or maybe it’s just that your web browser filter is set to “give me all the smut”.
Now I will say that searching images in say Google or Bing images or on Flicker, etc. “if” you have no filters set and you search for some rather specific terms, it will bring up some very, very sick and twisted stuff, but again, it’s not something that one can necessarily come across by mere accident. FWIW, I put into a Google images search the term “teenagers” and didn’t find any pornographic pictures.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=teenagers&tbm=isch&ei=ocXNU6E1joeiBKvggKgK
I must not be doing it right. Being that you are such an expert in porn, perhaps you can educate me.
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