How extreme porn has become a gateway drug into child abuse

The Guardian 15 December 2020
Family First Comment: It’s imperative that we confront the issue now…
“UK child abuse expert Michael Sheath is seeing what he believes is a dangerous cultural shift in the profile of offenders, brought about by the enormous change that increasingly extreme pornography is having on the developing teenage mind… It is the increasingly extreme themes available on mainstream porn sites that he thinks legitimise further deviant and criminal behaviour.”
PornInquiry.nz

Michael Sheath has been counselling people with what he describes as “deviant sexual interests” for a long time.

“I have been working with men who abuse children for 33 years. For the first 15 years I worked with child molesters and I still do that, but now I also work with downloaders of child abuse imagery and online groomers.”

Sheath is principal practitioner at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, counselling men who have been arrested for looking at child abuse images. He is on the frontline of what experts say is a global crisis in online child abuse. There has been a year-on-year rise in child abuse images found circulating online, and every month 900 children are safeguarded and around 700 men are arrested or visit a police station in connection with indecent images of children.

Sheath is seeing what he believes is a dangerous cultural shift in the profile of offenders, brought about by the enormous change that increasingly extreme pornography is having on the developing teenage mind.

“With our cohort of men there are two groups. The first is older men whose sexual education and awakening came before the internet. They will have in the main learned about sex with another person who gives feedback, resistance, encouragement.

“Before the internet there was a ceiling on how much porn you could consume, maybe your dad had some; you had to go to a sex cinema to watch a film. It was limited in scope and there was a stigma on its consumption.
READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/15/how-extreme-porn-has-become-a-gateway-drug-into-child-abuse