Concerns Grow Over Sexual Awareness of Children

“I’m a sixth grader girl. Boys keep asking me whether I want to have sex with them and they keep teasing me that I am flat-chested. Whenever they do it, I feel humiliated as if being flat-chested is a sin. What should I do?”

“I am a boy who will be attending the sixth grade next year. When my mom gets home late, I often masturbate watching pornography. I think I should stop this behavior, but it seems I can’t control myself. Sometimes I feel I really want to have sex. Please, help.”

These are some of the letters sent by elementary students who go online to get professional sex counseling through e-mail and private chat rooms at www.9sungae.com.

Most of these letters suggest that these days children are no longer the naive ones that the grown-ups believe they are. Children who sexually assaulting other children by mimicking lewd films they saw on the Web do not seem to suffer any sense of guilt. Not a few of them reveal the shocking levels of their distorted sexual awareness and deviated knowledge.

An elementary school girl pleaded for help, saying, “Some of the boys in my classroom asked me to go outside of the classroom and touched my body. I refused what they were doing to me, and they hit me. I don’t want to go to school.”

Another girl said, “I went to my classmate’s home. Suddenly, he kissed me and touched my private area. Is this sexual assault?”

These written testimonies indicate that the group sexual assault case that happened at an elementary school in Daegu is not a single exception that was committed by only a few perverted children.

Kim Hyeon-sook, an expert at the sexual counseling center, said, “Some children get their first periods and experience wet dreams when they become fourth graders. Given these physical responses, they are already adult body-wise. Some precocious children even ask contraceptive measures, but sex education for children seems to fail to keep up with the reality.”

Many children often fall victim to obscene materials on the Internet. Growing popularization of UCC and P2P file-sharing online makes it possible for children to gain easily access to debauch materials.

A police survey on 6,150 assailants of violence in primary and secondary schools nationwide disclosed the similar results.

Some 55.4 percent respondents, or 3,409 offenders, said that they have accessed lewd and violent Web sites, and 42.3 percent, or 1,443 respondents, said they felt a sudden urge to copy what they saw online. Some 57 respondents said they actually did.

Professor Lee Soo-jeong at Kyonggi University said, “The problems lie in the current situation void of any regulations on x-rated materials for children online. Given they are at the stage when their values are not completely established, their exposure to such materials can lead them to imitate what they see.”

The fact that the ages of children who commit sexual violence have gradually become lower supports this argument.

According to police, the number of sexual criminals aged 13 or less stood at just 14 in 2003, but last year saw the number jump to 48. Those committed sexual crimes between 14 and 16 were 461 in 2003, but more than doubled to 1,019 in 2007.

A police official pointed out, “The most fearful school violence is sexual violence. Such crimes are committed by the children who see indecent materials on the Internet and imitate them out of curiosity. Offender students say they just mimic what they saw and that they do not feel any remorse.”

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