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.
Addictive secrets: Charlie was just 11 years old when he was gripped by the scourge of internet pornography (posed by model)
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 He became withdrawn, moody and sullen.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 s***' 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.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2132342/How-internet-porn-turned-beautiful-boy-hollow-self-hating-shell.html#ixzz1saezvvW6
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