Curbs on children’s access to online pornography need to be brought in urgently to stop the spread of an activity that is partly to blame for normalising sexual harassment in schools, according to the new children’s commissioner for England. Dame Rachel de Souza is urging governments and tech companies to introduce age verification checks. She Read more
Matt Fradd is an Australian-born Catholic lay speaker and author who specializes in digital pornography addiction. Founder and executive director of The Porn Effect, where he promotes a pornography accountability smartphone app to young people, Mr. Fradd was interviewed by telephone about his new book and the potential of Marian consecration to help fight pornography Read more
New Zealand has stubbornly high rates of sexual violence, despite feminist movements like #MeToo. Laura Walters looks at the the societal barriers to ending rape. The advent of online dating and aggressive porn increasingly appear to be a contributing factor to stubbornly high rates of sexual violence, according to new research. A series of studies Read more
Online pornography is one of the fastest growing addictions in the United States, on par with cocaine and gambling. Once confined to the pages of a smuggled Playboy magazine, pornography can now be in the hands of anyone with a smartphone, and is more prolific and anonymous than ever. PornHub, one of the world’s largest Read more
In 2013, Beyonce Knowles topped GQ’s list of “The 100 Hottest Women of the 21st Century.” That same year, the “definitive men’s magazine” that promises “sexy women” along with style advice, entertainment news and more ran a shorter listicle: “10 Reasons Why You Should Quit Watching Porn.” The list included reasons such as increased sexual Read more
I was in my teens when a sudden rush of sexual publications became available, thanks to a change in censorship law. The Left-wing bookshop where I worked bought boxes of them, mostly lurid black and yellow-covered paperbacks of Robert Burns’ jaunty poems about fornication, The Kama Sutra, and The Perfumed Garden. We possibly made a profit for Read more
The public is becoming increasingly aware that pornography addiction is a real problem for many men and women in our culture—and Catholics are no exception. Yet as Catholics, our first thought may be to try to eradicate any sinful behavior with some good old-fashioned perseverance and, of course, grace from the Sacrament of Confession. I Read more
It’s a familiar pattern. An outgoing, enthusiastic guy begins slowly but surely to change. At first it’s almost imperceptible — a shift in mood or a vacancy in the eyes only those closest to him can see. It’s not drastic or alarming, but it’s real. Maybe his friends start to notice when he doesn’t talk Read more
When a therapist friend told Allison Havey that her then 13-year-old son was almost certainly viewing online pornography, she felt angry. “I was offended because I thought, why would he be doing that? It’s deviant behaviour and he’s not deviant.” What Allison now knows is that it’s natural for boys to want to look at Read more
Lately I’ve been writing about — and hearing heart-wrenching accounts of — people struggling with pornography addiction. It’s rampant in our culture in the West. The deeper I dig into the statistics and the anecdotes, the more I’m realizing that it is very much a cross-cultural issue, and that even as the internet has transcended geographical boundaries Read more