Joseph Deschambault’s fits of rage began when he was just nine years old.

“He went from the sweetest little boy, very thoughtful, tender-hearted,” his mother, Tasha, recalls from their home in Crystal City, Manitoba. “Within months he was rude and mean and callous and belligerent and vulgar.”

Joseph, now 12, admits he had a problem. “Out of nowhere I would just pop into a rage fit on my mom and start spouting and yelling and just being completely angry.”

Looking for answers, Joseph’s parents found a clue when they checked the family computer and found a trail of online searches for porn websites. Joseph had lost his innocence when he found hard core Internet pornography. He didn’t have to try very hard. In fact, the porn found him.

“I’d be playing a video game on the internet and all of a sudden a pop up comes on the side and you go ‘Where did that come from?’ and the more and more it comes you say I wonder if you could find that here.”

It wasn’t like finding a Playboy stashed in a closet. This wasn’t erotica. This was women being violated, penetrated multiple times by multiple men, gagged, choked, slapped, pounded, spit and ejaculated upon. Free, anonymous, available 24/7 and always just one click away.

Joseph became consumed and obsessed by the images he saw. He couldn’t stop his secret searches.

Joseph’s parents were horrified when they saw the images their son had found. Reluctantly, they broached the subject with him. He broke down instantly. He felt embarrassed, guilty and like his “stomach was rotting from the inside out.” But that didn’t stop him.

Joseph is not alone.

“The average kid first looks at porn around eleven,” explains Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston and an anti-porn activist. “The average kid at eleven has not had sex that means pornography carries that much more weight. So it looks real. It normalizes violent, abusive sex.” Dines told W5.

Joseph believes his porn-watching was an addiction.

In San Antonio Texas, Neurosurgeon Don Hilton believes that pornography addiction is just as real as drug addiction.

“If you consider pornography and the fact that it’s a super normal stimulus biologically speaking, it presents endless novelty which our brain likes, and then you have the makings of a very powerful stimulus reward particularly when you combine that with a masturbatory reward,” Hilton told W5.

It’s all about the chemical in our brains called dopamine. Hilton says recent studies show the brain of a porn addict reacts the same way as the brain of a drug addict.

Joseph had to quit pornography. But he was fortunate enough to have the support of his family who took drastic measures. They cut him off: no mobile devices and only on the computer with his parents or older sisters. His parents started talking to him about the girls and women in the images he couldn’t stop thinking about.

Joseph’s father, Al, asked him “How much older than your sister are they? Do you think they’re having fun?”

“All of a sudden putting a human face on the pain made my son change. He realized there are actual people that this is affecting.”

W5’s Victor Malarek asked Joseph about the advice he’d give boys his own age that find themselves trapped in the self-destructive cycle of hard core porn addiction.

“Tell your parents and say ‘Please help me’,” Joseph advised. He may only be twelve, but his analysis of the trauma he endured and inflicted is quite adult. “It’s definitely a world of secrecy and a lot of times I would feel like ‘this is just me, I’m alone, I’m the only one who has this problem,’ when really it was the complete opposite.”

“Deal with it as soon as you can, because it will eat you like an acid.”