Teen Porn Use, Part 1
Worth Your Time!
Resource Recommendations to Help You Parent and Mentor Most Effectively
Porn, Part 1
Based on my on-the-ground experiences (conversations, journals, etc.) with students over the past several years as well as what I've read and listened to from numerous sources, porn is one of the biggest struggles preteens and teens face. Parents, grandparents, and mentors need to be aware of what's out there, how youth struggle with it, and ways they can help. I had been waiting to address it until I found the right article, video, or podcast, but finally I decided to just share a list of things I've learned. This week's Worth Your Time is about the scope of the problem, and next week I'll focus on some helpful thoughts and ideas.
No meme this week. I figured that googling "porn meme" would be a bad idea.
Porn isn't just a guy problem - girls struggle with it too. The perception that "it's a guy thing" adds an extra layer of shame and embarrassment and often makes it more difficult for girls to open up about it.
When guys tell me the age at which they started looking at porn, 5th grade (10-11 years old) is the most common age. One high school freshman (in a Christian school and from a ministry-involved family) told me he didn't really remember much of his life before porn - "probably 3rd grade."
The "good kids" struggle with porn too. Young people who come from Christian families, who play or sing on a middle school or high school worship team, who have parents who are church leaders and Christian school teachers and worship leaders, who are the captains of their sports teams, who have A's in Bible class and have memorized lots of Bible verses, etc. struggle with porn just as much as anyone else. When everyone thinks you're the "good kid," it can be even harder to admit that you're addicted because you have a reputation - and trust - to lose.
Filters, parental monitoring, and not having a smartphone don't necessarily mean they're not accessing porn. One 7th grader, who was a spiritual leader in his Christian school and respected by both peers and adults (and whose dad was a church leader), had been watching porn on his grandmother's phone whenever his family visited her. He started when he was in 5th grade. Since she wasn't tech-savvy, he knew that she would have no idea as long as he deleted the history.
This is not "Playboy porn." In just a few clicks on a smartphone or iPad they can access all kinds of categories of porn based on their personal interests: different hair colors, different skin colors, different nationalities, three different big body parts, different ages, different positions, different genders, different species, different "activities," different toys, different bodily functions, different levels of physical violence, and different numbers of partners (or none at all). Every category has thousands of videos, and sometimes tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of videos. And that's just on one porn site.
By the time students get caught or open up to someone, they've usually struggled with it for years. If they start in 5th grade and don't tell anyone until 11th grade, that's six years they've lived in guilt and shame and fear of getting caught, and it's six years they've filled their minds with video after video after video...
There's a common cycle:
Watch porn.
Feel guilty, ask God for forgiveness, and swear you won't do it again...
An hour, a week, a month goes by... the temptation gets strong... and you do it again.
Feel guilty, ask God for forgiveness, and swear you won't do it again.
An hour, a week, a month goes by... the temptation gets strong... and you do it again.
Feel guil... Ok, you get the point.
Many of them hate themselves for looking at porn. I've yet to meet a student who wasn't bothered by it.
Ultimately, they question their faith. "I've asked God to help me over and over, and I still struggle with it..." "I've asked God for forgiveness so many times and promised him so many times that I wouldn't do it anymore, and yet I keep doing it. How could God still forgive me?" It primarily brings up issues of God's existence and God's grace.
When this topic comes up with a group of 8th graders or high schoolers, I'll often make this statement (so that they know they're not alone): "By this point, most of you, if not all of you, have seen/watched porn, and many of you in this room are addicted to it." I've never had a student push back on that statement. At a minimum, they all know what it is.
What I'm not saying: I'm not saying that every student everywhere is addicted to porn. What I am saying: Most of them have seen porn at least once, many of them sometimes watch it, and many of them are addicted to it - and you can never assume which of those categories the youth you know fall into.
What can we do about all of this? How can we help them? I'll focus on that next week. On that "happy" note, have a great week!