Kansas City television station KSHB recently interviewed doctors and nurses at Children's Mercy Hospital, a hospital that serves roughly 1,000 children annually who have been sexually assaulted.
Heidi Olson, a nurse at Mercy Hospital said that she was shocked at what the data has told them: "almost half of our perpetrators are minors" between the ages of eleven and fifteen with twenty five percent of all sex crimes now being committed by minors.
According to Jennifer Hanson, a child abuse pediatrician at Mercy Hospital, many of these assaults "include physical violence in addition to sexual violence." A major factor, in the victimization of these children is something society has often deemed "harmless": pornography. Often, according to Mercy nurses, the young victims are forced to view pornography, others forced to act out something portrayed in a pornographic video, and others are recorded in a sexual act.