Is this the end of childhood?
“He was sort of loud panting in my face and pretending like he was going to strangle me.” – Girl, 11
This was not the playground encounter that parents expected to hear from their daughter. The 12-year-old boy was acting out the “porno sounds” he had heard online. This account, and the many I’ve heard since, have alerted me to the reality that, when it comes to the digital world, something is going very wrong for our children.
To find out more, I spoke to friends, family and parents. Teachers said they were witnessing an increasing number of sexual conversations in the school yard. But the most enlightening stories were from young people themselves.
One girl told me: “The boys were talking about YouTube in class and said they were looking for girls with girls. I just wanted to see what they meant.”
Another very young girl told her parents: “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen. I want to go back in time.”
While a 17-year-old boy said blithely: “It’s normal, everyone watches it.”
Each story I heard had shock value, but even more disturbing was the
