Chill about your kid’s smartphone? You might want to rethink that. From a media report in Kansas City:

Children’s Mercy says they’re seeing a disturbing trend in child sexual assault cases.

Children are abusing children.

“I think that was kind of shocking to us all as we were collecting this data, is that almost half of our perpetrators are minors,” said Heidi Olson, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Coordinator.

The SANE program’s data shows perpetrators are likely to be between 11 and 15 years-old.

“Another thing we’re noticing is a lot of those sexual assaults are violent sexual assaults, so they include physical violence in addition to sexual violence,” said Jennifer Hansen, a child abuse pediatrician at Children’s Mercy.

The victims are typically, get this, girls from four to eight years old.

More:

Nurses are also finding more and more that pornography is playing a role in these cases. That can include a victim being forced to see porn, a victim reporting that the perpetrator said they’d watched porn, being forced to do something shown in a pornographic video, or a victim being recorded doing a sexual act.

Hansen and Olson says they’re noticing kids are being exposed to porn at very young ages, around 4 or 5 years-old. They say a child can develop unrealistic and dangerous ideas about intimate relationships by being exposed to violent, graphic porn.

“We know that it’s probably multi-factorial. I think there are lots of things that contribute to this, but that is the question; How are we, as a society, failing in such a way that we have 11, 12, and 14-year-old boys, primarily, committing violent sexual assaults?” Hansen said.

And:

She says pornography doesn’t play a part in most MOCSA cases, but she sees it playing more of a role.

“Pornography is different today than it used to be. So, 80 percent of the 15 most-viewed films portray women being hit, spit on, kicked, called degrading names. The kinds of behaviors we wouldn’t want our children, or anyone, to act in. Pornography has become more violent,” said McCreary.

Read the whole thing.

The problem is that even if you refuse to let your kids have a smartphone and unmonitored Internet access, many other parents aren’t as scrupulous. It’s a nightmare. How is a mother or father supposed to know if the children their little ones are playing with have been exposed to violent pornography, and are a danger to other children?

What a world we have built for our children. My God.