Caution: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.
For many years, I thought concerns over children's exposure to pornography didn't apply to my daughter. She's only 9 years old and has little access to the internet. She won't see pornography for years, I thought.
But that thinking is naive and sorely mistaken, says social scientist Michael Flood, who's at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. He has been studying how pornography impacts children for two decades.
"When we survey parents, we find that they often really underestimate the extent to which their own children are likely to have seen pornography," Flood says. "Virtually every child will encounter pornography."
