Parents’ Story Of How Their Teenage Son Got Addicted To Porn

With three teenage boys in the house, Sally Shaw and her husband Simon, an Army officer, thought that they had taken every possible precaution with regard to internet safety. The boys, Sally’s stepsons, were banned from using devices in their room after 10pm, and the wifi in their four-bedroom home in Derby was switched off at night. Little did they know that one of the boys – 14-year-old Matthew – was secretly switching it back on in order to watch porn.

‘We first noticed his behaviour change when he got his iPhone,’ says 41-year-old Sally. ‘He was spending a lot of time upstairs, but we thought maybe he’d got a girlfriend.One night, I found him in his room having a conversation with two school friends on the phone while they all watched the same porn on their iPads. He jumped up and tried to hide what he was doing, but what I’d seen was revolting. I couldn’t believe it.’

Furious and upset, Sally and Simon, 43, grounded their son for a week and took away his phone and iPad.

After several frank conversations in which they imposed even stricter rules about internet usage, they hoped the problem was resolved. In fact, it was just the beginning of their nightmare.

‘He would find ways to get around us,’ says Sally, a full-time mother. ‘He kept offering to hang out the washing in the garden and I thought he was being helpful.
It was only later that I discovered he was sitting at the bottom of the garden accessing the neighbours’ wifi.
‘We tried taking the phone away but he would just get the iPad from his younger sister. Or he would borrow one from a school friend. He managed to change the parental controls on our wifi so that only he knew the code.
‘We discovered there was a core of about five boys involved; a kind of ‘porn ring’ who would watch these videos in tandem so they could see each other’s reaction to it. I found it really disturbing. We didn’t want to take his phone from him permanently, because it’s a two-mile bike ride to school and we wanted him to be safe.’

This paradox is one that many loving parents find themselves wrestling with today.

For Sally and Simon, things went from bad to worse. In desperation, Sally went to the school and spoke to the headmaster, who called in Matthew and his friends. It emerged that the ‘porn ring’ had begun when one of the boys had accessed online porn via video-sharing website YouTube.

Sessions were subsequently arranged for the boys with the school counsellor, both individually and with their parents.

Sally says: ‘Matthew didn’t speak to me for several days after I’d been to the school, but as far as we know the ‘porn ring’ ended there. It’s a morbid fascination, and what’s disturbing is that it’s very explicit sex, without any romance around it. It gives children a distorted view of relationships. The problem is that it’s too easily accessible, and the temptation is there all the time.’

Latest statistics show that 81 per cent of 13 to 18-year-olds own a smartphone, while 43 per cent of 12 to 15-year-olds own a tablet such as an iPad. With 58 per cent of mobile phones now having access to the internet, children are able to access pornography with alarming ease.

‘Children can find sexual material fairly easily on the internet, whether as a result of curiosity or just by accident,’ says Carolyn Bunting of Internet Matters, an organisation that educates parents about the risks their children might encounter online.

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