“When I became a SANE nurse, I thought the typical perpetrator was most likely going to be a creepy old man in his 60s who lured kids into his basement with lollipops, but I was so wrong. The biggest age range of perpetrators that I see in my hospital are children. In fact, for the third year in a row, our biggest age range of people committing sexual assaults are children ages 11-15 years old.”

Why are these children sexually assaulting other children? The answer is not surprising to me but it is devastating to me. “Pornography is often a main factor,” Olson says, “and sometimes the only factor, that influenced a child to act out in a sexually harmful way.” And the children that also and is working with are not isolated. Last year, the Guardian in the United Kingdom published an article entitled “Child-on-child sexual assaults soar, police figures reveal.” 

Opinion: Our kids exposed to an adult world

Melinda Tankard Reist

The Courier-Mail is to be commended for its series on the hypersexualisation of our young people — especially the impacts on children by allowing them to be exposed to porn even before their first kiss.

What has been documented here in the Generation Sext campaign is what I’m hearing everywhere I go.