What happened before the Internet?

 

This blog will address the incidents leading up the today's child exploitation evil scenario and how the use of pornographic materials contributed in destroying lives of these innocent souls.

Psycho-historian Lloyd deMause has written extensively on the global history of child abuse. In the History of Childhood, he details the experiences of children in India and China as particularly abusive. In India, children were regularly masturbated by their mothers, and adults used children sexually long before they reached the age of ten. Growing up in China was equally cruel. Both male and female children were sexually assaulted and forced into prostitution. Ancient Greek and Roman girls were often raped, and older men used boys for sex. Until recently, in Western countries children were considered small adults. Labor laws and child abuse protection laws are phenomena of the twentieth century in the United States. Child exploitation existed long before the Internet, and networks of offenders communicated before the personal computer was part of our everyday lives.

The growing use of the Internet by adolescents and younger children created the possibility for their victimization by adult sex offenders. As more and more children flocked to the Internet in the 1990s, adults wishing to pull them into sexual relationships welcomed them. But before the wide use of the Internet if an adult had an interest in having sex with a child, the individual would seek contact by gaining employment where there would be exposure to children, or volunteering to work with children, or having one’s own children, or befriending the neighborhood children.

Imagine the vast difference in communications technology that has occurred over the past quarter of a century. Any time prior to 1995, a person seeking sex with a child would become a scout leader, priest, teacher, clown, father, uncle, bus driver. In the 1980s in some places, citizens band radio was popular among preteens and teenagers, and adults would meet children through that medium. Mostly, though, until the increased use of the Internet, adults met child-victims through the adults’ employment or familial ties.