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
Addiction, unhealthy relationships and rising levels of sexual abuse in youth is the reality of easy access to pornographic material. Auckland-based clinical psychologist Rebecca Daly-Peoples says the nature of the internet is restricting the opportunities to address the issue within a family context. “It’s completely influencing the entire way they’re seeing sex and intimacy,” she says. “It’s not just Read more
Starbucks and McDonalds in the US are adding Internet pornography filters to their free WiFi offerings. The McDonalds announcement follows a campaign by the anti-porn group Enough is Enough (EIE) and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. The Internet filtering has been activated in the majority of McDonalds’s 14,000 outlets in the US. “McDonald’s is 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
The most recent issue of Time Magazine features a fascinating and deeply troubling article on the prevalence of pornography in our culture. The focus of the piece is on the generation of young men now coming of age, the first generation who grew up with unlimited access to hardcore pornography on the Internet. The statistics Read more
Exposure to pornography harms children so much that it should be considered child abuse, Australia’s Catholic bishops have said. A commission of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference gave a statement to a senate committee in their nation last month. The committee was making an inquiry into the harm of Internet pornography. “Children have a right Read more
There is good news and bad news about pornography this week. The bad news is that women are clamouring for a fair share of the porn industry; the good news is that men are deserting that pigsty. These are very broad strokes, but the details are equally disturbing and encouraging. First, the women. It is Read more
Naming it “corrosive” and a “dark” sign of contemporary American culture, the U.S. Catholic bishops approved a document this week condemning the production and use of pornography as a mortal sin. Reaction from the bishops’ critics didn’t take long. Some said the bishops themselves have very serious problems with pornography; others pointed out the not-so-distant Read more
Pornography may be defined as “the depiction of erotic behavior (sexual display in pictures or writing) that is intended to cause sexual excitement” in the viewer.(1) Over the past decade there has been a large increase in the pornographic material that is available to both adults and children. Mainstream pornography use has grown common because Read more
An advocacy group has reported that hotel and resort chain Hilton Worldwide is to remove on-demand pornography from its hotel rooms. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation publicly thanked Hilton Worldwide for this. In 2012, Catholic law professor Robert George of Princeton teamed up with prominent Muslim intellectual Shaykh Hamza Yusuf in writing letters to Read more