Alert to Parents: The Growing Scourge of Pornography and Child Predation

It’s getting ever more dangerous out there for our children. We briefly address four dangers here by drawing your attention to 3 articles. We address all of these issues at greater length in our 2019 3rd editions of our books, though to these articles come out since those books were completed.

The dangers:

  • Pornography is increasingly shoved at our kids and grandkids by unscrupulous and unprincipled producers and distributors through every possible digital means.
  • Experts agree that pornography is becoming ever more provocative and extreme.
  • The dangers of addiction to pornography compound the moral problems; these dangers are becoming ever more evident as scientific understanding of this addictive phenomenon advances.
  • The availability of pornography depicting the abuse of children (real abuse and not staged) is growing exponentially. Children are being actively recruited/seduced into such activity. It is increasingly clear that law enforcement efforts to curtail this epidemic are hardly making a dent.

1. The growing availability of pornography:

We’ve been watching the growing availability of porn, especially to children, for many years. Even so, was a shock for us several years ago to read the excellent (if thoroughly secular) article by Mark Hay titled “Datagasm.” In it we discovered that porn distributors are using the same kind of big data, “pursue the customer” mass marketing and customer targeting techniques that are being used by Amazon and other Internet retail operations. Further, they are using increasingly the same strategies and techniques used by people operating online phishing schemes. Those distributors are determined to worm their way into our lives, and especially the lives of our children, in order to build their clientele and ensure long-term streams of income.

2. Pornography is Growing More Extreme:

There is a flood of free “basic” porn available to consumers out there. Often, this is the gateway drug to more extreme types of porn that require payment; this is where the real money is for producers. Shockingly, we found out from the “Datagasm” article that genres like “incest porn” are growing in popularity. Now it’s getting even worse. In his excellent (and again secular) article “A Science-Based Case for Ending the Porn Epidemic,” Paschal-Emmanuel Gobry states: “Virtually all pornography, very much including the ‘vanilla stuff,’ has grown more extreme, more violent, and specifically more misogynistic and degrading towards women.”

Gobry illustrated his concern by describing two increasingly popular genres of extreme pornography:

1) “‘interracial’ porn, which nearly always means a specific type of interracial congress: black men and white women. The genre is inevitably based on the worst racial stereotypes and imagery. And interracial porn not only has been getting more popular, and more degrading to women, but more racist.”

2) “Kink” porn, which Gobry describes as follows “One series of Kink videos is based on the following concept: the pornstar is alone in a room with several men; the director explains to her (and we watch) that if she can leave the room, she gets cash; for each article of clothing she still has on at the end of the scene, she gets cash; for each sex act that one of the men gets to perform on her, he gets cash and she loses money. One has to grant them a devilish kind of cleverness: it lets them enact an actual violent rape with legal impunity. The woman really resists; the men really force themselves brutally on her. Of course, she “consented” to the whole thing, which, somehow, makes it legal.”

3. Pornography Addiction Is Becoming a More Serious Problem, Especially for Children

Gobry provides a number of examples of negative effects for pornography, especially for children. Two quotes will suffice to demonstrate his concerns.

“As we consume more and more porn, our brain is rewired so that what triggers the reward system that is supposed to be linked to sex is no longer linked to sex but to porn…. Once you are addicted to online porn, the thing that provides the biggest dopamine jolt is whatever is most shocking.”

“But there’s another alarming implication for what neuroplasticity means for porn addiction: while we now know that, at any age, the brain is much more plastic than we previously thought, there is still no doubt that, all else being equal, the younger we are the more plastic our brains. You can learn, say, a foreign language or a musical instrument at any age, but there is a level of skill that you will only ever achieve if you start young. Our brains are always plastic, but they are still much more plastic when we are young. Furthermore, when certain pathways are solidified at a young age, they tend to stay that way, because while it is still possible to change them later on in life, it is much harder.”

Pornography Depicting Real Sexual Abuse of Children Is Exploding

We were stunned recently by the deeply disturbing front page article in the Sunday New York Times about the prevalence and easy availability of videotaped instances of real child sexual abuse. Entitled “The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse: What Went Wrong” by Michael Keller and Gabrielle Dance, the subtitle is equally disturbing: “Online predators create and share the illegal material, which is increasingly cloaked by technology. Tech companies, the government and the authorities are no match.”

We urge parents to read the full article. As a taste, here are the first two paragraphs

“The images are horrific. Children, some just 3 or 4 years old, being sexually abused and in some cases tortured.”

“Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this: Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year.”