How internet porn changed my beautiful boy

• Mother tells how her 11-year-old boy’s ‘entire character’ changed when he began watching porn on his laptop in his own bedroom

• His internet history showed he had also watched ‘vile, paedophiliac images’ presented in cartoon form
• More needs to be done to help other children addicted to internet porn, says mother
• Comes as internet providers refuse to give parents an easy-to-use block on extreme material on home computers

By LIZ MARTIN

Major internet firms were recently accused of being ‘complicit’ in exposing children to hardcore pornography and violence online by continuing to refuse to give parents the choice of blocking material that no child should see, but that is too easily available on every device now in the home. 

Their defiance comes despite an independent inquiry into online protection by MPs that warned a generation of teenagers were addicted to porn.

Here, one distraught mother tells the Mail how her 11-year-old son changed beyond all recognition when he began secretly watching porn on his laptop in his own bedroom.

Online porn is as addictive as any drug. It’s enslaving hundreds of thousands of British children. I know, because my son was one of them.

Charlie was 11 when not just his behaviour, but his entire character started changing. He’d always been a cheerful, friendly, sunny sort of chap. At his junior school he was popular with his classmates, loved playing football in the school team and was rarely in any kind of trouble with his teachers.

Over the space of his first two terms at secondary school all that changed. If Charlie had been on Class A drugs he couldn’t have been more transformed. He became withdrawn, moody and sullen. He wasn’t sleeping at night. He lost his normal gargantuan appetite. He looked hollow-eyed and listless. He had none of the boyish energy and high spirits that we were all used to.

He began writing things like ‘I hate myself’, or ‘Charlie is shit’ on scraps of paper, newspapers, books, even his bedroom furniture and walls. He drew obscene cartoons with speech bubbles filled with the filthiest words in the dictionary.                                  

I once rolled back his sleeve to find ‘I am disgusting’ scrawled on the inside of his arm. I managed to stop myself from crying until I’d left the room. But the moment the door closed behind me I broke down completely.

I couldn’t understand. How could my beautiful boy, who could light up a room and my heart with his smile, have turned into this hollow, self-hating shell? What had I done wrong?

Almost six months went by and still I could find no answer. Charlie was still very much a small boy. He didn’t have a hair on his chin and his voice was high and unbroken. So it wasn’t some kind of hormonal reaction to becoming an adolescent. And the doctor assured us he wasn’t physically ill.

Maybe it was a family issue. My husband, Mike, and I were going through a rough patch, as most couples do at one time or another. We weren’t the screaming and shouting kind, but there was a sullen gulf of silence opening up between us.

Was Charlie responding to that? Or perhaps it was the influence of his new school. 

Charlie goes to a big suburban comprehensive that prides itself on the quality of its pastoral care as much as its exam results. But even the best schools contain a few bad apples and my suspicions fell on a particular boy in Charlie’s class.

I can’t prove that he started it all, but I suspected there was something going wrong from the moment the two of them first met. 

I knew his new friend was encouraging Charlie to play the violent video games that I hate so much and have always banned. I feared that, as the youngest of several brothers, this particular boy might also have access to cigarettes, drink and even drugs.

It never occurred to me that the problem was pornography. But then one night my eyes were opened to the truth.

I was going to bed when I noticed the light on in Charlie’s room. It was almost 11pm on a school night, so I went in to tell him to turn off his light at once.

Charlie was sitting in bed with his laptop in front of him — we’d bought him one when he’d started his new school, but he clearly wasn’t doing his homework. When he saw me come in, he quickly closed the computer. The way he did it was so furtive that it would have aroused my suspicions even if his face wasn’t stamped with the guilty look of a boy who’s been caught red-handed.

I snatched the computer from him, turned out the light, said a brusque ‘goodnight’ and left the room.

Mike was away on business, so I was alone when I went to our bedroom, still holding the computer. I thought I’d better shut it down. I knew Charlie liked to play a particular online fantasy game — an entirely innocent one — and I had visions of it chugging away all night. But when I opened the laptop, it wasn’t a child’s game that I saw, but hardcore pornography.

A couple were having sex. I can’t possibly go into the details, but this was not a normal act of lovemaking. Yet it was tame with what I discovered when I checked Charlie’s internet history.

An 11-year-old boy with no credit card had been able to access websites that presented every possible kind of perversion. Today’s pornography is vile beyond description. I had never before seen or even imagined anything like the scenes of violence and sadism, the shocking mistreatment and degradation of women and, worst of all, the child abuse that now appeared before me. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2132342/How-internet-porn-turned-beautiful-boy-hollow-self-hating-shell.html