Treasure Seekers

It might surprise you to learn that boys are searchers. It almost seems as if they are hardwired in this respect to go out and find, they hunt and they seek . They will first check out their immediate enviroment, then they will look under the settee and behind it and put their hands down the sides, feeling for what might have dropped down . They will search the cupboard, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers . They will risk life and limb climbing to the forbidden places . They dont know what they are searching for but they certainly know when they have found it . So many Dads seem to have a hidden stash, by stash I mean their little porn heap, their pile of mags, their 'gentlemans' perk.
How many of them are under the illusion that no one could possibly find their secret place or on the other hand just dont give a damn whether it is found or not, almost making their neglect a philisophical stance. They even attempt to justify this neglect by following the 'mature drinking' theory . The idea is that you allow a child the ability to access porn if they choose, so as to encourage the development of a responsible self policing attitude to it in later life . The problem however is that the very nature of porn, it's imbibition and it's consequences are invisible. Pornographic imagery can be brought to mind at any time, it can be mentally played with and chewed on all day long without anyone knowing . You can be thinking of your last delicious dose while your face looks dutifully downcast while listening to the lecture following being caught in the act of trawling the computer top shelf . The hunger for more and more, stronger and graphic imagery occurs when the current set of mental pictures start to loose their flavour and no longer produce the' hit '. It is no surprise that perverts prior to abusing their young victims expose them to pornographic material . This exposure to hard core pornographic material is used to illicict a concensual response to their overtures . Alcohol and drugs are also used in this fieindish process, the alcohol is not in itself the occasion of sin but is used to destroy the inhibition mechanism of the conscience . It is then after having bound their victims in these webs the stalker moves in for the thrill.
While the toxic nature of the chemicals in the alcohol and drugs, through abstinence can be cleaned from your body, the toxic nature of pornography is near impossible to erase from your brain.
For the drug addict or the alcoholic to go back into dependency he actually has to go out and find his panicea whether it be heroin or methadone, buckfast or carlsberg special brew . However for the porn addicted all he has to do is go to his memories and recall pictures or scenes and he has immediatly been re-exposed to his addiction.
The dynamics of sexual addiction have been increasingly well documented by numerous authorities, yet the information is seldom mentioned to teenagers. Few are aware that when one views pornography, powerful biochemical reactions are unleashed which can quickly lead to addiction . When a child is excited by an image , the adrenal gland secretes a chemical called epinephrine into the blood stream . This chemical then travels to the brain and locks in the image . From this point, the mind may recall the image at any time and trigger the feelings of arousal . The effect of this process is why so many adults can still vividly see the first pornographic image they saw as a youngster.
Other biochemicals are also at work which produce powerfull euphoric states in the porn viewer. Children experiencing this self induced chemical thrill naturally wish to do it again, [ this is true also of graphic violent images, where a child who is interested in one goes in search of the other ] The very act of of approaching pornography then creates a rush of expectation and anticipation before the first image is even viewed .
This can so often lead to ritualisation of porn to maximise the 'buzz' . Children who begin with casual viewing may suddenly find themselves consumed by recalled erotic images and be trapped in a cycle that requires ever more explicit imagery to achieve the same response. This childhood pre-exposure sadly often goes on to become a springboard to a future life of impurity and promiscuity .
Pornography, especially when first encountered by children leaves within them a disturbance, the waters that were and should have remained still have had a rock thrown into them . That thing that becomes disturbed goes on to affect not only adult life but relationships in marriage . Pornographic imagery promotes themes that are both degrading and unnatural, fostering expectations that are abusive and sinfull, depicting women as insatiable playthings . The sexual act itself through pornography becomes thoroughly dehumanised and desensitized.
Today we have a situation where internet access brings the filth down from on top of the wardrobe and into the childs bedroom . Parents are immigrants to the computer world, their children natives . If you have internet access in your home and children with the ability and the freedom to use it, then you have porn in your home .
There is an online party forum that estimates say 9 out of 10 teenage internet users have been active on . On that forum webcams are used to send public and private images of young people to complete stangers. Many of these images are pornographic, the childs computer terminal bedroom being the studio. Perverts pay via paypal using the digital mobile phone as an anonymous receiver.
Some children rather than going into town to 'hang out' choose to hang out around the computer terminal . Here they can visit the virtual Soho and enter invisibly any of the millions of ' adult shops' that they wish . They can take down and examine the glossy merchandise to fill up their mental store house, taking home with them the temptation to self abuse and the urge to carry out the distortions and gross perversions that they have viewed there on another person . As they walk blindly around this sexualising computer wonderland they are ever at the risk of propositioning by paedophile groomers who would freely admit that the internet is for them a dream come true.
The secret life of the modern Adrian Mole
'Adrian waited impatiently for his parents to go out and leave him 'master' of the home. After all did'nt they trust him? His first rush of anticipation came as he said a cheery 'BYE!' and the door shut.
The excitement grew as he booted up his computer. While he was loading , he would pull out a CD-ROM that he had hidden up and slip it into the drive. The disc contained hundreds of pornographic images that he had down loaded from his computer.
After viewing a handfull of pictures to feed his excitement he would log onto the internet and proceed to one of his favourte sites to indulge his insatiable quest for new images to add to his 'gold stash'.
It is in this scenario that so often a younger sibling perching at the shoulder finds his first initiation like some diabolical baptism and so the damage spreads . Many children are living a double life, one life the parent sees the other is a private life of self abuse of the body and of self harm to the spirit . This poison that so affects most of todays adults is deadly when administered to a child, there is a time for a child to wake, that time should never be hastened prematurely . Unchaperoned internet use by minors is abuse, period. It is to have abused the brief period of innocence that is the childhood right of all of us fallen adults . It seems that the mechanism by which society forces children to become grown ups sooner is simple, abuse them . The Devil must be delighted that his catch is so much greater by playing on the pride of some parents who feel that they must join in this crusade of extinguishing the light of childhood by educating their progeny with the knowledge of good and evil rather than innocence and purity.
Pope Pius XII put this dilema succinctly and so simply in his encyclical Miranda Porus.
'Everyone knows full well that very often children can avoid the transient attack of disease outside of their home, but cannot escape it when it lurks in the home itself . It is wrong to introduce risk in any form into the sanctity of the home.'
The bible can verify not only the holy Fathers concerns but the veracity of his words
Mathew 6;27
'The lamp of the body is the eye. It follows that if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be in darkness. If then the light inside you is darkness, what darkness that will be'.
So many parents are oblivious to the content of their childs minds and to the growing cancer affecting their childs soul . They hope, but never ask, and they are never ever told . Like all addictions the addiction to pornography thrives in secrecy, mum and dad become seen not as loving good shepherds, but the patrolling heads of an inner city school playground,. People not to be trusted but people to be hidden from . Incredibly most parents today freely admit that they know little or nothing about what their children look at online! If your earthly guardian angels in the form of your parents are blind to the things taking place within the souls of their children only one person becomes the beneficiary, Satan, and where he guides even 'Angels' fear to tread .
If you suspect even remotely that your child may be being drawn into the web of internet pornography then you must talk with them, listen to them, pray with them . The deep wounds and the mental scars that each and every pornographic image leaves both in the mind, and deeper still in the soul are wounds that can never be completely healed . Like the disease malaria even after what seems an age in remission the symptoms can burst out again and again .
What you can do however is bury them . Every time an image presents itself for inspection it can be resisted, and everytime it is resisted it can be shoved further and further back down into the pit from whence it came . The best form of resistence is not to attempt to tear the temptation out by the root because that is exactly what the temptation wants, it wants attention and it is through that attention that the temptation gains strength . Rather than stand and fight, flee at the first sight . The way to flee each assault is through prayer, petition the good God and keep petitioning him until the presence of sin leaves you, and be assured it will, no matter how long it gives the impression that it is there for life . The futher you have fallen the longer and the harder the road to recovery, but you can by the grace of God be renewed no matter how fallen you had been . When you stand in judgement it will not just be for the things that you did, but also for the things that you failed to do on which you will be judged . Dont fail your children . Because if they are not with you in heaven then there is a strong chance are that both of you will be somewhere else.

Matt18;5
'But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his kneck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea'.
'Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the man by whom the temptations comes !'

St Elizabeth Seton had a vision around a hundred and fifty years ago , it was a vision that then could not be properly understood . It was of a black box in the homes of every family , and it as from that box that the devil robbed souls. But perhaps the last word should go to Our Lady of Good Success, who referred in 1610 to events destined for the twentieth century.
..'Woe to the children of these times...In these unhappy times there will be unbridled luxury which acting thus to ensnare the rest to sin, will conquer innumerable frivilous souls who will be lost . INNOCENCE WILL ALMOST NO LONGER BE FOUND IN CHILDREN nor modesty in women, and in this supreme moment of need of the church, those who should speak will fall silent'