Testimony from Northampton: Porn Inspired My Molestation

Massachusetts legislators heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing on March 16, 1992. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.415).

Testimony of D

I live in Northampton. When I was a child, five or six years old, the boys in the neighborhood had pornography, and they sexually abused me. I do not know whether they found it in the woods, or whether they got it from their homes. There were four or five, sometimes six of them, and they ranged in age from 8 to 13. They did to me what they saw in pornography. The pornography told us what to do. Mostly they saw naked women. Playboy or Penthouse stuff, so they stripped me or convinced me to strip myself. They also saw pictures of sexual intercourse, so this is what they did to me. One after the other, they took turns being the man in the picture, and I was to lay there and be the woman.

The cause of my abuse was pornography. The pictures that they had gave them the ideas and told them what to do, and if it was in the picture, it was the truth. And I thought that’s what it meant to be a woman.

See also:

Porn Figures Prominently in Family’s Tragic History of Molestation
The man I lived with last used pornography books to sexually arouse my
son so he could molest him–and my son and his friends used pornography
to molest my daughter–to experiment on her sexually–using the
pornographic books as teaching guides…

Testimony in Minneapolis: “Pornography in the home is insidious. Girls pick up the message, they act it out, they don’t know why they feel suicidal and crazy.”
One example, for instance, was a young girl. By the age of four, she saw her parents sitting on the couch together reading pornographic magazines. When she tried to go join them, they were laughing and happy. She said it was the only time she saw her father’s eyes light up. He felt alive. When she would try to read, they said no, no, which was confusing because they seemed happy reading this. By five years old, this young woman, at that time a young girl, would bring boys from the neighborhood, draw off her clothes the way she had seen in the magazines, and let herself be abused sexually. This is by five years old. This woman has gone through a great deal of work. She was alcoholic, very ill. She is now a student. She is now working through these things in therapy and is recovering, but she had never herself made the connection to the pornography. All she felt about herself [was], she was crazy, she was sick. How at five years old could I have been doing this? Pornography in the home is insidious. Girls pick up the message, they act it out, they don’t know why they feel suicidal and crazy. I have seen this many, many times.

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn, Child Molestation, Coerced Stripping (explicit language)
The first thing I want to talk about happened when I was three years old. When I was three, I was sexually abused by a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy…

One of the kids pushed me inside and shut the door. Then this boy grabbed me and he pulled down my shorts and sexually abused me. In short, he finger-fucked me and he made me masturbate him. I was really terrified. I thought I was in hell, and I was also in a lot of pain. I started crying really hard and he finally let me go, but I was told that if I told anyone, I wouldn’t be believed, that it was all my fault and that I would be punished. He also told me that he would hurt me again if I told anyone.

His sister told me that this game he had learned from his dirty books. I knew that he had these dirty books because I had seen him with them.

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