Dr. Kevin Skinner explains why early pornography exposure can traumatize young children. Before age 8, the sexual brain isn't developed, so kids interpret explicit material as violence rather than sexuality, creating lasting distortions in how they understand adult relationships.
Questions this video answers
4 to 8
Chapters
I would say the big thing is the earlier you get into the exposure. If you just go to stages of development, a child's brain, you take someone 4 to 8, the sexual components of their brain are not even working at that point. There's a lot of data out there about how it can be interpreted almost as violent for a child to see sex. So it's got this little traumatic piece to it of where it's not perceived as a sexual erotic thing so much as a violent, traumatic image. And then it just skews everything about what sex and sexuality should be. So it creates this completely false representation of what it is. And so you have someone entering into their actual developmental stages where sexuality comes online, and they have a completely false notion of what sexual interaction between two adults should look like and be like.