The Pornography Industry Should Not Be Allowed This Much Access to Our Children

Imagine someone drove a white van into your neighborhood, opened up the panel door, and invited children and teens from the neighborhood, including yours, to watch sexually explicit videos of men and women doing the most degrading things possible. In most of our neighborhoods, such a man would be arrested in minutes, and we would make sure that no such vans came cruising for our children again.

But in the virtual neighborhoods most of our teens now traverse on their smartphones, it’s a very different story. As they explore platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Pornhub, millions of our children are being ushered by Big Tech and Big Porn into the dark and degrading world of online pornography. Credible studies estimate that between 70% to 90% of our teens have been exposed to pornography online. It is a simple fact that young people today have more access to pornography than any generation in history.

But why do we allow this? However normal this kind of content has become online, it’s we as a people who get to decide what normative or moral standards shape our society, in the form of laws. And if we care about the dignity of women and children, along with encouraging compassion in men, the best research continues to confirm that laws designed to protect young people from exposure to pornography need to be upheld and enforced.

A New Report on Underage Pornography Use

How are our children affected by this tidal wave of pornography? As scholars from the Institute for Family Studies, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and the University of Virginia, we took up this question in a new report released this week, “Unprotected from Porn: The Rise of Underage Pornography Use and the Ways it is Harming Our Children,” surveying the latest science on pornography’s impact on children and teens.

The report expands on an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in connection to the court’s hearing Wednesday of a case debating the constitutionality of state laws requiring age verification to access pornography websites. We were joined in the drafting of this brief by two leading scholars of teen mental health: Joanathan Haidt, social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of “The Anxious Generation,” and Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of more than 180 scientific publications and books.

What the latest science tells us is that despite pornography’s designation as “adult material” or “for mature audiences,” large portions of minor-age children and teens access online pornographic content on a regular basis. In fact, a recent study found that almost 1 in 4 teenage boys reported that they view pornography every day — a rate of habitual use that is more than twice as high as 10 years earlier.

It is a simple fact that young people today have more access to pornography than any generation in history.

These studies also reveal that this rise in underage pornography use has been accompanied by a shift to more extreme and harmful types of pornography being available online. Today’s pornography regularly depicts rape, violence against women, incest, and sex with minors, and so on. None of this is good, developmentally, for our children. But, in an alarming trend, a growing number of studies find that a significant portion of minors are directly seeking out and viewing these types of harmful online sexual materials.

It is time for our culture to come to terms with the inconsistency of valuing the dignity of women and the importance of developing a compassionate generation of young men, but then turning a blind eye to the types of messages conveyed in pornography to our young people. Such violent and demeaning content is not merely passive media that has little to no effect on young minds. On the contrary, decades of media studies have shown that consuming any type of media likely influences both the attitudes and behaviors of our children.

Our new report shows that pornography consumption increases young people’s risk for both short-term and long-term harms, including increased mental health problems, unhealthy sexual scripts and behaviors, increased sexual aggression, potential compulsive struggles, decreased future relationship stability and other developmental challenges. And the risk of lasting harm is even greater for teens with a set of existing risk factors, such as aggressive tendencies, impulse control challenges, mental health struggles and family break up, that make them particularly vulnerable to the threats of pornography.

For instance, a recent meta-analysis study reviewed 22 studies with over 20,000 research participants and found that higher use of pornography was associated with more verbal and physical sexual aggression. Another large meta-analysis study published in 2022 examined 61 studies and found a robust and consistent effect between frequently viewing pornography and later struggles with problematic or compulsive pornography use.

For skeptics, it’s important to note that these effects have been documented across dozens of studies, including large national and international surveys, meta-analysis studies, and critical reviews of scientific literature, the highest standards for social science research.

Taking Steps to Protect Our Children

Teens across the globe are struggling with unprecedented levels of emotional problems — depression, anxiety and loneliness, as Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” shows. Much of this increase appears to be the result of a collective social failure to properly protect children from the rise of digital childhood, daily social media consumption and pornography. Protecting the best interests of children in today’s world will require us to more fully acknowledge the “rise in vulnerability” we are witnessing among children and teens across the globe.

For better or worse, digital safety is now an unavoidable part of modern parenting.

Yet we have simply not taken sufficient collective action to safeguard children. Of course, parents have the primary responsibility to safeguard their children from the harm of online pornography and sexual media. Research shows that the quality of the parent-child relationship is one of the best predictors of child well-being. What’s more, parental warmth and engagement is a more important protective factor against the risks of harmful online content than is any specific set of broader rules or practices. Parents ought to also delay cellphone and social media use to later ages and become knowledgeable about filtering and accountability tools that can protect their children. For better or worse, digital safety is now an unavoidable part of modern parenting.

But given the evident insufficiency of parental controls and filters and the all-encompassing nature of digital childhood, parents should not be left alone to safeguard their children from a debased and debasing industry of sexual media and pornography websites, along with social media platforms all too willing to serve up sexualized content.

This is why we need collective efforts to hold both the producers of pornography and social media platforms accountable for their criminal attacks on our children’s innocence and new laws designed to protect our kids from exposure to pornography. This protection should involve requiring pornography websites to verify that every user attempting to access their content is at least 18 years old. This is why we hope the Supreme Court will decide in favor of newly enacted state laws that are trying to protect children by requiring age verification to access pornography.

And by the way, this isn’t the ineffective requirements of the past that someone simply enter a birthdate. The technology is good enough now that age verification laws create an effective legal requirement for websites with sexually explicit content to confirm that their users are at least 18 years old, typically through a government-issued ID. Websites that fail to verify ages properly could be penalized with fines. They may also be held liable for damages to minors exposed to adult content.

As a complement to these efforts, we also support the new movement to implement device-based age verification and require parental supervision for minor social media accounts, parental consent for app downloads, and accurate app ratings from the industry. All of these steps would create a safer digital world for our kids, one where they are not regularly exposed to degrading images that corrupt their hearts and minds.

Our children need and deserve nothing less.

Jason S. Carroll is the Family Initiative Director at the Wheately Institute at Brigham Young University and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Brad Wilcox is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and University Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Brian J. Willoughby is a Professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University and a Fellow of the Wheatley Institute, Michael Toscano is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

Editor's Note: This article appeared first at Deseret News. It has been reprinted here with permission.