The reason I think there’s more sexual abuse taking place today is because of the internet. There’s more acting out today, I think, because of the internet. Not every pedophile molests children. There are pedophiles who may be content to simply fantasize about sex with children. And it used to be if a pedophile wanted to get child porn they’d have to bring it in from another country, import it illegally, or it was very difficult to get access too. And it was enough to get it every six months to keep them content. Now, a pedophile goes on the internet and literally in minutes he has access to so much child porn that he gets desensitized and so then he needs more. In addition, on the internet, the pedophile’s talking to other pedophiles and he thinks “Well, maybe I’m not so different and so bizarre”. And then the third problem with the internet is that the pedophile’s access to kids. In the kid’s virtual bedroom. Talking about intimate things with a child, maybe pretending they’re another child. And so, the combination of access to child porn, um, access to children, and the feeling that they’re not so weird because of the access to other pedophiles I think creates more acting out of pedophiles. The other thing that’s going on now is people ask me “are we just hearing about more of it today?” And I think the answer is yes, we’re hearing more about it because as a society we’re more aware of sexual abuse and people are feeling more empowered to talk about it, but, again, because of the internet we’re also catching more predators.
For example, if you look on the news almost any day of the week, you’re going to see a teacher getting caught molesting a child; many high school students. And people ask me, “Why is that, did that not happen before?” The answer is it did happen before, I think it’s happening more now and they’re getting caught more now. Why? Social media. Here’s what happens: years ago if a teacher wanted to contact a student they called their home phone and their mom answered the phone. So, they didn’t have access to the kids so now with social media teachers can have access to kids through all sorts of social media. Whatever the latest level of communications is they can contact a kid via electronic social media. But, that’s another reason that there’s more of it we see because they’re getting caught more often because in most of these cases you’re gonna see the perps leaving a digital finger print. The mother sees this inappropriate photo the teacher sent to their child or the inappropriate message or text the teacher sent to their child. And so a lot of the teacher perpetrators are getting caught that way.