Dame Rachel de Souza is urging governments and tech companies to introduce age verification checks.

She warned that access to hardcore pornography was shaping children's expectations of relationships and was partly to blame for thousands of testimonies of sexual harassment by schoolchildren published on the Everyone's Invited website over the last few months.

The testimonies prompted Ofsted to carry out a review of what was happening in schools. Its report, published last week, revealed that inspectors found sexual harassment and online sexual abuse to be a routine part of pupils' lives.

"We can't ignore that, nor should we," de Souza told the Observer.

"One area I'm clear on is that online hardcore pornography warps boys' expectations of normal relationships and normalises behaviours that girls are then expected to accept, and it's just too easy for children to access."

"Most children who have seen pornography say the first time it was accidental.

"In the real world, adults wouldn't leave something dangerous or inappropriate lying around for children to stumble upon - why should the internet be different?"

Recently, in her role as a member of the Gender Equality Advisory Council, she brought up the subject with G7 leaders.

She wants a focus on effective age verification online.

"Nobody thinks the acceptable price of privacy and freedom of choice for adults should be unrestricted access to porn for children," she said.

However, experts warned that blanket porn blocks may be neither effective nor helpful. Ruth Eliot, a sexual violence prevention specialist at the School of Sexuality Education, which runs workshops in schools, said that trying to stop young people from finding online porn was "a fool's errand".

"Abstinence-based education around sexuality has never worked. Young people choose to watch porn as a result of a perfectly natural and normal curiosity about sexuality.

"Instead of policing that, we should upskill them on how to experience porn in a way that makes them understand the cultural context and that it's not an instruction manual."

Ellena Martellozzo, an associate professor of criminology at Middlesex University, said her research showed that the priority should be on preventing children from accessing violent porn accidentally.

This kickstarts a cycle in which they shift from seeing it as "shocking" and "disgusting" to developing an interest in it.

"Children rely on porn to learn about sex and relationships when what they see isn't a healthy way of viewing relationships at all," she said. "Pornography is one of many risk factors that can lead to sexual violence." Continue reading

• Image: The Guardian

Mr. Fradd was interviewed by telephone about his new book and the potential of Marian consecration to help fight pornography addiction. The following transcript of our conversation has been edited for style and clarity.

Your new nine-day Marian consecration doesn't address pornography explicitly, but you've spoken in the past about Our Lady's role fighting porn addiction in a digital age.

How can Marian devotion assist young men and women overcome enslavement to pornography?

Well, that wouldn't be my first line of attack!

If someone struggling with pornography approached me for prayer advice, I'd want to know some other things first: Are they accountable, are they using appropriate software, are they doing therapy? Sort of human formation things.

Too often we skip human formation and jump straight to the spiritual. But I've heard people talk about how their devotion to the Blessed Mother has helped them regain a proper, holistic, beautiful image of women that pornography had eroded.

What does "Marian consecration" mean as you use it in this book?

Thomas Aquinas never spoke of "Marian consecration" per se, though he did speak about religious consecration.

On the ninth day, we present a prayer that Aquinas wrote in the language of "entrustment."

So when we talk about "consecration," we really mean entrustment, entrusting oneself to the Blessed Mother.

Thomas says in his prayer: I give to you my past, my present, my future, my body, my mind—you know, everything.

It sounds a bit like St. Louis de Montfort, but it's not.

The reason I wanted to present this book is that while I appreciate Louis de Montfort, his way of writing never resonated with me like Aquinas.

Since there are many paths to the Blessed Mother, I wanted to put this book together for others who find Aquinas helpful.

What about this Marian consecration might challenge a young person struggling with addiction?

In the work I've done on pornography, speaking to hundreds of thousands of teenagers, young adults and parents, I've found that the topic is overly spiritualized in a way that other sins and vices aren't.

People struggling with alcoholism and anger issues might pray, for example, but they also seek natural helps such as A.A. meetings or counseling.

But when I'd ask Catholics what they're doing about pornography, they would give me spiritual solutions for a problem that isn't solely spiritual. Continue reading

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 out of Victoria University of Wellington show the changing online landscape may be contributing to, and exacerbating, sexual violence, rape and intimate partner violence.

This is taking place in a world where women are increasingly empowered by feminist movements and economic independence but are still overwhelmingly the victims of sexual abuse.

Online dating and blurred lines around consent, coupled with New Zealand's current consent regulations, make it difficult to hold perpetrators to account.

The continued objectification and self-objectification of women in media, along with the perpetuation of rape myths in news media, exacerbate the issue.

And increasingly aggressive pornography and a lack of education and conversation about porn is a potentially dangerous mix in a country where about 20 percent of adult women are subjected to sexual assault in their lives.

The research was presented at a day-long symposium, which explored 21st century barriers to rape reform.

Criminology professor and lead researcher Jan Jordan spoke of the long legacy of silencing and objectifying women.

Women were taught to be "beautiful and quiet if you want to be safe", she said.

The feminist movement and the second-wave feminism did a lot to advance women's rights and moves towards gender equality and pay equity.

However, the objectification and self-objectification of women has not ceased, rather taken on different forms over the past 40 years.

Research comparing sexual violence cases in 1997 and 2015 found there was little change in the amount of cases that met the evidentiary threshold to proceed to prosecution (1997: 30 percent; 2015: 28 percent), and the number of cases where there was a conviction also remained startlingly low (1997: 13 percent; 2015: 15 percent).

Jordan said this lack of progress was an argument for doing away with New Zealand's adversarial justice system in relation to sexual violence cases, reviewing the evidentiary threshold, and consent laws.

However, policing did not happen in a vacuum, so the other three pieces of research were commissioned in order to give the wider societal context in which sexual violence occurs.

The part porn plays

The porn industry continues to grow, with 33.5 billion visits to PornHub in 2018, and an average of 92 million daily visits.

As porn has moved online it has become increasingly accessible and industry value has continued to climb.

Rental and ad revenue from adult videos in the 1990s grew into the billions. In 2014, the porn industry was worth $US97b ($145b).

Doctoral candidate Samantha Keene found a troubling increase in the rise of aggressive and degrading sex acts found online.

"Mainstream heterosexual porn is still made by men for men, and tells men that women like to receive aggression and tells women that we should like to receive that."

Keene analysed 40 years of porn, from magazines in the 1970s, through to adult videos, and online porn.

While research on porn was scarce and academics disagreed whether there was a causal link between aggressive porn and sexual violence, there were worrying trends such as choking - something that was prevalent in sexual violence and intimate partner violence cases.

Multiple experts said this type of porn normalised sexual aggression.

Some believed the depiction of male dominance and aggression in pornography was a backlash against feminism, Keene said.

However, aggressive pornography increasingly included women who were willing participants. And more women were searching for, and watching, porn categorised as ‘rough sex'.

Keene said it was not clear whether it was a form of research, or a way to engage in a fantasy in a safe space. Continue reading

• Image: Dutchreporter

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 sites with porn video streaming, reports that it averages 75 million viewers per day, or about 2.4 million visitors per hour.

In 2015 alone, the number of hours streamed from the site was double the amount of time human beings have populated the Earth, according to TIME Magazine.

And while pornography used to be a simpler problem for priests to address in the confessional - consecrate yourself to Mary, go to weekly adoration - the growing level of addiction makes it a much more complex problem for the Church to address.

That's why Fr. Sean Kilcawley, the program directory and theological advisor for pornography ministry Integrity Restored, has started to put on intensive trainings for clergy, providing them resources and practical tips for how to address the growing crisis of pornography addiction.

How the trainings work

For an intensive training, Fr. Kilcawley takes a dozen or so priests for 3-4 days and immerses them in resources and training for the porn-addicted in their fold.

He also facilitates shorter, one-day conferences.

"We try to equip the priest to get that person to come talk to them outside of confession, just to bring that into the light, so that the priest can then become the first responder in the field hospital of the church," Fr. Kilcawley told CNA.

Smaller groups work best, he added, because it allows the priests space to process the information and to be more vulnerable with one another. Continue reading

• Mary Rezac is a staff writer for Catholic News Agency/EWTN News

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 impotence in men that regularly viewed pornography, and a reported lack of control of sexual desires.

It was inspired by an interview with NoFap, an online community of people dedicated to holding each other accountable in abstaining from pornography and masturbation. The site clearly states that it is decidedly non-religious.

Matt Fradd, on the other hand, is a Catholic. Fradd has spent much of his adult life urging people to quit pornography, and developing websites and resources to help pornography addicts.

But even though he's Catholic, Fradd's new anti-porn book, "The Porn Myth," won't quote the saints or the Bible or recommend a regimen of rosaries."I wanted to write a non-religious response to pro-pornography arguments," Fradd said.

That's not because he's abandoned his beliefs, or thinks that faith has nothing to say about pornography.

"Whenever I get up to speak, people expect that I'm just going to use a bunch of moral arguments (against porn). And I have them, and I'm happy to use them, and I think ultimately that's what we need to get to. But I think using science...is always the best way to introduce this issue to people."

"In an increasingly secular culture, we need arguments based on scientific research, of which there's been much," he said. It's why he cites numerous studies on each page of his book, and why he's included 50 pages of additional appendixes citing additional research.

Fradd is careful to clarify in his book that it is not a book against sex or sexuality. What he does want to do is challenge the way many people have come to think about pornography, and question whether it leads to human flourishing. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: The Youth Culture Report

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 the first time ever, though these were mostly rather dull clinical descriptions of the contortions you can get into having sex, just to prove it can be done.

They were innocent times. The Joy of Sex appeared, with illustrations of people performing and encouraging - from memory - the wearing of a kind of absurd loincloth arrangement to spice things up.

People huddled over copies of this in their lunch hour, too timid to be seen buying them, too nervous to take them home. I think they thought this was pornography. How quaint we were.

I'd seen the real thing by then, shown to me by older men who little cared how disgusted I was, and what the images showed so explicitly. It wasn't pleasant, it never is, and it didn't have a pleasant effect on me, but the thrill of potentially corrupting young people is irresistible to corrupt adults.

Nothing has changed since, as far as I can see, except that much more degrading images are now freely available everywhere, with the result that some young men's brains get hard-wired with images that degrade women, and none that celebrate affection.

We thought feminism had won the battle for equality only to find young women, who now excel academically, are targets of misogyny that reduces them to sex dolls for male amusement.

The pity of it is that many young women think this is OK. Some boast of being prostitutes to support themselves through degree courses, and somehow we've come to think this is OK.

It's OK, in other words, to be a high achiever so long as you demean yourself at the same time. No harm done. I don't believe it. Continue reading

• Rosemary McLeod is a New Zealand writer, journalist, cartoonist and columnist.

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 had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Peter Kleponis, a clinician who also is the Senior Advisor for Educational and Clinical Programs for Integrity Restored, who has helped many men and women in their healing journey breaking free from porn. He told me about why, most of the time, perseverance and grace are important, but they aren't enough to break free from pornography use.

First of all, do all porn users automatically need professional help? In other words, when does a porn user become an addict? Does it parallel drug addiction?

Not everyone who struggles with pornography use is an addict. Just as a person can have an alcohol problem and not be an alcoholic, so can a person have a pornography problem and not be a porn addict. Dr. Patrick Carnes (2007) notes 10 characteristics of problematic online sexual behavior:

1. Preoccupation with sex on the Internet
2. Frequently engaging in sex on the Internet more often or for longer periods of time than intended
3. Repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back on, or stop engaging in sex on the Internet
4. Restlessness or irritability when attempting to limit or stop engaging in sex on the Internet
5. Using cybersex on the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or relieving feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety or depression
6. Returning to sex on the Internet day after day in search of a more intense or higher-risk sexual experience
7. Lying to family members, therapists, or others to conceal involvement with sex on the internet
8. Committing illegal sexual acts online (for example, sending or downloading child pornography or soliciting illegal sex acts online)
9. Jeopardizing or losing a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of online sexual behavior
10. Incurring significant financial consequences as a result of engaging in online sexual behavior Continue reading

• Caitlin Bootsma is the editor of Human Life International's Truth and Charity Forum.

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 about those hobbies he used to love. Perhaps his coworkers make more and more passing remarks like, "Is everything okay?"

There's a thin but undeniable air of apathy in all he says and does. Friendships get put on hold, and events are skipped for no particular reason. It's nothing earth-shattering; he just seems not really there.

In my own life, and in the lives of friends I've known, this is one of the most reliable signs someone — male or female — is losing the battle against pornography.

The dangers of pornography are well-documented. For many years, Christian pastors, teachers and writers have warned that porn is a serious spiritual and emotional threat to individuals and families.

The effects of porn addiction have become so commonly seen in our culture that non-Christian observers are beginning to talk about it. Time magazine, for example, recently devoted an entire cover story to the testimonies of several young men who felt their pornography usage greatly wounded them later in life.

When we list the dangers of pornography, we often address the typical things: We talk about how porn degrades and objectifies men and women.

We argue that porn puts spiritual and physical walls between husbands and wives and how it can "re-wire" our brains to cripple our capacity for real intimacy and enjoyment. All of these warnings are absolutely true and need to be repeated.

But there's another consequence of porn, one that might seem insignificant but may actually be one of the deadliest effects of all. Porn doesn't just dirty the imagination or wound the spirit — it also kills ambition. Continue reading

• Samuel D. James serves in the President's Office at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

What Allison now knows is that it's natural for boys to want to look at sexual imagery. In fact, the average age for first exposure to online pornography in the UK is 11. For slightly older boys, it's completely normal - of 3,000 boys aged 13-18 surveyed, 81% said they looked at it.

Allison - who with Deana Puccio has written a book dealing with this and other issues for parents in the digital age - says that there are two major consequences. First, this suggests that conversations about sexual behaviour have to happen much sooner, and within the family.

Second, the conversation is now much more important because of the proliferation of online pornography, which boys are looking at on their mobile phones.

There is a risk to this generation, say Allison and Deana, that online pornography could damage the sexual sensitivities of boys and their future relationships. Girls, who are far less likely to be interested in pornography at this stage in their lives, are at risk too, from their partners and future partners who could mistake the fiction of online pornography for the "norms" of satisfying sex.

This has far-reaching consequences, and it's something most parents don't know enough about. But if you go online and look at what today's young people are viewing, it's a world away from the type of pornography a generation who grew up in the 70s and 80s might be familiar with. We're not even talking about hardcore images; it's the relatively tame videos that focus, obsessively, on male pleasure, particularly oral sex. The vast majority of women have surgically enhanced breasts and female pubic hair is almost entirely absent. By normalising such things, pornography could be conditioning boys to have unrealistic expectations of the women with whom they will have sex. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian, article by Joanna Moorhead who writes for the Guardian, mostly about parenting and family life. She has four children.
• Image: The Telegraph

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 in the best ways, it has been the vehicle for what I suspect history will look back upon as one of the most pernicious evils of our time.

And none of us are immune to it.

But it's not hopeless.

And the very last thing we're called to do, as parents, is throw our hands up in the air and resign ourselves to the sad inevitability of our kids and their friends becoming statistics.

So we take the practical steps. We talk to our kids early and often about what pornography is, the real cost of it, emotionally and spiritually and physically, and we put physical and behavioral barriers in place to protect them and to safeguard the sanctity of our homes.

At the same time, we are called to be salt and light in a world grown dim and flavorless - and increasingly so, where sex is concerned.

So we fill our little people's hearts and minds with truth, goodness, and beauty, and we demonstrate for them what real love looks and feels and sounds like. And we send them out.

Christianity does not belong in a bubble. And neither do little Christian foot soldiers in training.

So while do our best to make our home base a sanctuary of love and learning and growing in discipleship and virtue, we must also equip our kids to engage the outside world, bit by bit, bringing the Gospel to their friends and classmates by means of those organic, innocent child-to-child encounters that the very young are so ideally suited for. Continue reading

• Jenny Uebbing answers FAQ's on Catholicism, life issues, marriage, and how to safely combine pregnancy with caffeine.

The statistics on this score are absolutely startling. Most young men commence their pornography use at the age of eleven; there are approximately 107 million monthly visitors to adult websites in this country; twelve million hours a day are spent watching porn globally on the adult-video site Pornhub; 40% of boys in Great Britain say that they regularly consume pornography—and on and on.

All of this wanton viewing of live-action pornography has produced, many are arguing, an army of young men who are incapable of normal and satisfying sexual activity with real human beings. Many twenty-somethings are testifying that when they have the opportunity for sexual relations with their wives or girlfriends, they cannot perform.

And in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is not a physiological issue, which is proved by the fact that they can still become aroused easily by images on a computer screen. The sad truth is that for these young men, sexual stimulation is associated not with flesh and blood human beings, but with flickering pictures of physically perfect people in virtual reality.

Moreover, since they start so young, they have been compelled, as they get older, to turn to ever more bizarre and violent pornography in order to get the thrill that they desire. And this in turn makes them incapable of finding conventional, non-exotic sex even vaguely interesting. Continue reading

• Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire ministry.

These are very broad strokes, but the details are equally disturbing and encouraging.

First, the women.

It is difficult, goodness knows, to find a new angle on anniversaries like International Women's Day, but it was startling to find on The Conversation a plea on behalf of female porn directors for fairer access to the market.

The Conversation is an international forum in which academics can popularise their work and is funded by academic institutions.

Its articles can be reproduced under a Creative Commons license, and MercatorNet has done so quite often with articles living up to one or other of the qualities advertised in its tagline, "Academic rigour, journalistic flair".

I suppose that Zahra Zsuzsanna Stardust, the Australian PhD student (and former parliamentary candidate for the Australian Sex Party) who wrote the piece titled "Women in the porn industry need rights and proper pay, not token gestures", displayed a certain academic rigour in that her research into the dark corners of female porn seems quite extensive. Being involved in the business herself must help.

As for flair, one would have to credit her with a bit of that, too, for passing it off as a plea for social justice rather than the promotion of a degrading subculture that it is.

Readers are supposed to feel indignant for the women directors who were asked by the captains - or rather, pirates - of the online porn industry to share their work free on IWD in return for "mass exposure".

Z Z Stardust's exposure of the monopolistic features of the industry that nurture such effrontery is a marvel of Marxist analysis. If the subject matter were not so putrid, it would be hilarious. Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet, an article written by Carolyn Moynihan, a New Zealand journalist with a special interest in family issues.
• Image: Restoring the Soul

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 sex abuse crisis.

The upshot was that the bishops ought to have different priorities.

One could be forgiven for confusing this disagreement with one from the 1980s.

Didn't it play out over a generation ago — with the result that our culture basically accepts porn as part of sexual liberation?

Perhaps. But the era of magazine and video porn has been replaced by online porn, and this may lead us to wonder if Catholic teaching on this topic is worth a second look.

Indeed, the bishops' new initiative resisting porn is likely to gain many unexpected allies, including many feminists.

The digital age has produced a situation in which on-demand video of virtually any sexual act is available for free at the click of a mouse. Last year, one site alone had 18.35 billion visits, leading some to call porn "the wallpaper of our lives."

And as virtual reality porn becomes available, it is difficult to see how this trend might reverse itself.

The result has been that porn now dominates the American sexual imagination. What sex is for has been "pornifed."

The rise of "hook-up culture" is instructive here: Such casual and impersonal sex is, unsurprisingly, very similar to a porn scene.

Feminists — from Andrea Dworkin in the ‘80s to Naomi Wolf today — are among the few allies joining the Catholic bishops in energetically resisting this trend.

The porn industry, it turns out, is overwhelmingly patriarchal and works out terribly for women. Continue reading

• Charles C. Camosy is associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.

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 it is accessible, affordable, and anonymous. It is accessible because it is just a few keystrokes away on the Internet.

It is affordable because many online sites offer free pornography to lure viewers to their web sites. Other sites simply post third-party videos and do not charge the viewer for web traffic.

It is anonymous because it can be viewed in the privacy of a person's home. There is no longer a need to visit an adult book store or the local XXX theatre.

While the exact amount of revenue that the pornography industry generates in this country is unclear, the Internet filtering service Covenant Eyes estimates the 2012 US revenue to be around US$8 billion.(2)

It is estimated that since 2007, revenue has declined by 50% (3), but this decline is likely due to the availability of more free online pornography and not to a total decline in pornography usage.

In 2008, the Internet and marketing firm Hitwise reported that globally 40,634 web sites distributed pornography.(4)

Who consumes pornography?

A 2014 Barna Group survey revealed the following demographic data regarding pornography use by American adults: (5) (See graphic in the article).

Demographic data is similar among younger age groups. A 2008 article in the Journal of Adolescent Research revealed that 67% of young men and 49% of young women found pornography acceptable.(6)

Pornography exposure for children and adolescents has become almost ubiquitous. In a 2010 survey of English students between 14 to 16 years old, almost one-third claimed that their first exposure to Internet pornography was at 10 years old or younger. (7)

In a 2011 survey, 31% of adolescent boys admitted visiting web sites that were intended as Adult Only.(8) Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet, from an article by L. David Perry MD FCP, a practicing pediatrician in Knoxville, Tennessee.
• Image: Women of Grace

Sexually explicit material is no longer on the fringes of our culture; it's in the mainstream.

Yet while the ‘dirty secret' about porn is well and truly out, Christians still haven't made much of a dent in the problem. In fact, porn use is rife among Christians and Christian leaders.

In putting this article together I conducted a simple online survey of British Christians (see the box for more details) and, even knowing what we do about the prolificacy of porn, the results make for surprising reading.

The survey suggests that more than half of Christian men and around a fifth of Christian women in the UK are using porn on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Pornography isn't just something unpleasant going on in the world; it's right at the heart of our churches.

Why, when the Church has apparently woken up to its porn problem, is its use even more prolific than we perhaps imagined? What has enabled this? Is it time to respond in ways other than the existing, and seemingly flawed ones?

To answer these questions, let's take a step back and look at how society's relationship with adult material has shifted in recent years.

Blurred Lines

The lines between pornographic and mainstream culture have become increasingly blurry; a slow creep in a more ‘liberated' direction seems to have reached a tipping point.

When poorly written publishing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey (Random House) made the transition from Kindle to paperback in 2012, pre-existing shame barriers simply disappeared.

People were happy to discuss how much they enjoyed the sexually explicit book. They were proud to sit and read a copy on the train.

Without any announcement, the boundaries of acceptability had shifted. I recently noticed a dad reading a copy as he sat poolside at our children's swimming lesson. Continue reading

• Martin Saunders is Youthscape Store's director of creative development, which means he spends his time devising new youth work resources, training and events.

And even if fathers are around, their sons don't engage with them much: boys spend 44 hours in front of a TV, smartphone or computer screen for every half hour in conversation with their fathers.

Why does any of this really matter, I ask the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who cites these figures in his new book Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male.

Why do boys need fathers?

Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University, replies that everybody needs a mother and father because they give different kinds of love. "Mothers give love unconditionally - because you came out of her body, a mother loves you. You bring home your report card and it's all Cs? Mom will say, ‘It's OK. Momma loves you anyway. Try harder.'

"Fathers give love provisionally. If you want your allowance, if you don't want me to turn off your computer, then you've got to perform. That's always been the deal with fathers and sons - you don't get a pass just because you exist, just because you got my name on your birth certificate. You're going to do it because you want your father to love you and admire you. That central source of extrinsic motivation is gone now for almost one out of every two kids."

The book, by Zimbardo and his co-author Nikita D Coulombe, is about why boys don't man up as previous generations of males ostensibly did. Continue reading

• Stuart Jeffries has been a Guardian subeditor, TV critic, Friday review editor, Paris correspondent and is now a feature writer and columnist for the paper

There is much debate about whether or not pornography is addictive.

Pornography addiction is controversial even among professional therapists.

This debate heated up when the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-V) for therapists did not include sexual addiction as a clinical diagnosis.

Many professionals wondered out loud what this means for professional therapists and their clients who are seeking help for sexual addiction, including pornography addiction (see Alexandra Katehakis article Sex Addiction Beyond DSM-V).

The two reasons that sexual compulsivity were not included in the DSM-V stem from the lack of research and lack of an agreed upon list of symptomatic behaviors.

This should be expected since the study of sexual compulsivity is relatively new.

However, not being included in the DSM-V does not mean it doesn't exist.

For example, compare this situation our society's gradual realization about the dangers of smoking.

For years, smoking was accepted and society wasn't aware of the health risks.

In fact, from the 1920's until the early 1970's tobacco companies used medical doctors to promote smoking for throat irritation. (See Tobacco Led Throat Doctors to Blow Smoke)

We know now that millions have lost their lives to smoking cigarettes.

It's easy to shake our heads and say, "What were they thinking?"

Criticizing the decision makers won't bring back the lost lives, but looking and observing our current blind spots as a society might help us prevent loss of individuals and families to sexual compulsivity.

Perhaps one of our blind spots is minimizing the challenge that individuals and couples experience as a result of hypersexuality. Continue reading

Sources

• Psychology Today
• Image: Scientific American

I can only imagine the apprehension of any church youth leaders using this activity last Wednesday. The Daily Mail headline, 'Minister: My fear for boys warped by porn' could have produced a rather uncomfortable conversation.

Twenty years ago as I started my teenage years, the internet didn't exist so the only access to hard core pornography would have meant me overcoming my embarrassment to purchase a top shelf magazine from the newsagent.

The rapid growth of the internet has changed that for young people today.Porn is everywhere. In fact, it's only recently that social networking has taken over pornography as the most popular use of the net.

With research showing that 97 per cent of boys have viewed online porn, many by the age of 11, the fear is that instant access to pornography, including extreme and violent images, is leaving boys with unrealistic expectations of sex and hence undermining future relationships.

The Church is not good at addressing these issues with young people. Where sex is taught it's usually in confirmation, and linked to marriage, ie it can be doctrinal rather than an exploration of young people's reality.

We cannot afford to shy away from conversations about sex and sexuality, because outside our classrooms and youth groups and away from family members, our young people meet the issues in the riskier surroundings of the playground, the media, and in the isolation of their bedroom with a computer. Continue reading.

Danny Curtin is the former National President of the Young Christian Workers, and continues to support their International Council. Danny writes and advises on youth ministry, and is a catechist and youth worker working in the United Kingdom.

Source: The Tablet

Image: Author's own

The Rural Financial Counselling Service reported recently that the number of rural people within Western Australia succumbing to internet pornography addiction, drug use and depression, is growing. Research shows internet pornography addiction to be a rapidly growing problem across Australia and overseas.

In the United States, internet pornography addiction is a factor cited in 50% of divorces. Increasingly too, young people are needing psychological therapy to help with relating and sexuality problems.

This is an important issue for parishes and for individual Catholics, for we exist as a Church to continue the mission of Jesus. Those in need were Jesus' priority, and internet pornography addicts certainly are people in need. We need to help them if we can - especially by inviting them to seek Christ's help.

I have written elsewhere about pornography actors as victims. The focus of this Pastoral Letter is on:

 How Christ can help
 The effects of pornography on an addicted person's brain
 Deepening in personal relationship with Christ
 How Christ seeks to help through his Church
 How Christ seeks to help through the Christian.

1. How can Christ help?
Many today would think that Catholic faith has nothing to offer the internet pornography addict. Yet, as for other Christians, Jesus Christ for Catholics is the Son of God and Saviour (the word ‘salvation' deriving from the Latin word for ‘healing').

He offers salvation from all in us that is not of God. This includes internet pornography addiction.

The human need for salvation

The general human need for salvation becomes clear when we remember that God originally created human beings in relationship with their Creator. Empowered by this relationship, our first parents experienced harmony within, harmony with each other and harmony with the rest of creation. 1
This situation changed when our first parents succumbed to Satan's temptation to reject their relationship with God. Instead of accepting their dependence on the Creator who created them to love, they desired to be equal - wanting to be ‘like gods'.

They rejected the God who gave them even life itself.
Now their original relationship with God was destroyed. Their original experiences of harmony were replaced by inner division, social division and division between themselves and the rest of creation.

These are the experiences of ‘original sin'.
The root of the divided human nature with which we are born. As a result, the ‘control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered'.

Ever since, people have experienced inner conflicts.
For example, our experience today is of selfishness conflicting with love; judgementalness with compassion; and confusion with truth. At times emotions weaken the will and cause intellectual confusion. Relationships between men and women can be damaged by lust.

Internet pornography addiction is one of the symptoms of this inner division.
The will is weakened by lust, desires and increasing neurological dysfunction (as we will see). This addiction is a consequence of efforts to escape life problems through fantasy.

There is no other way of restoring genuine and long term inner harmony than by the healing of the human relationship with God. People need Christ's salvation.

Christ as Saviour

The whole Christian message is about Christ as Saviour. In the context of this Letter, we can only recall key points relevant to the topic of internet pornography addiction.

First, Jesus began revealing himself as saviour by miracles. For example, he cured the sick, freed cripples to walk, restored sight to the blind. These examples were visible signs to show his power to the healing, liberating and giving new sight. His power showed Jesus to be establishing the kingdom of God in the world. By his miracles, Jesus was showing his power to be greater than the kingdom of Satan. Everything in creation not of God was a symptom of Satan's influence.
This included all forms of sin, human suffering, disharmony and death. In revealing that his power could conquer Satan, Jesus described Satan as the great deceiver, the ‘father of lies'. Satan's greatest successes today are those people who have been deceived into imagining that Satan does not exist - as is common in modern Australian society.
Jesus taught that he had come to redeem all people from the power of Satan. All who commit sin are ‘slaves' to the sin. Jesus would redeem them by dying on a cross, giving his life ‘as a ransom for many'.

Second, Jesus revealed that he had come to share ‘eternal life' - the life of God - with all who believed in him. He, with God the Father and the Spirit, would ‘make a home' in them.

Jesus fulfilled these promises by his resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

By his resurrection, Jesus empowers believers today to live as he taught. Through Baptism, we ‘share the divine nature'.

We share the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ.
Third, Jesus left a number of means for members of the community of his followers, whom he referred to as his ‘church', to draw on his power for their lives.

These means include the seven sacraments, the Eucharist being the most important. As we do so today, the influence of the divine grows within us. The influence of Satan, including the power of internet pornography addiction, weakens.

We accept Christian salvation by entering into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He taught us how to pray, to worship and to live to do this. As we relate personally with Jesus as Saviour, our relationship with God is healed. Jesus' power also strengthens our souls' spiritual faculties so that inner harmony and harmony with others is restored. Continue reading

Sources

• Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference Media Blog
• Image: Novus

"We are, respectively, a Christian and a Muslim, but we appeal to you not on the basis of truths revealed in our scriptures but on the basis of a commitment that should be shared by all people of reason and goodwill: a commitment to human dignity and the common good.

"As teachers and as parents, we seek a society in which young people are encouraged to respect others and themselves—treating no one as an impersonal object or thing. We hope that you share our desire to build such a society.

• "Pornography is degrading, dehumanizing, and corrupting.
• It undermines self-respect and respect for others.
• It reduces persons—creatures bearing profound, inherent, and equal dignity—to the status of objects.
• It robs a central aspect of our humanity—our sexuality—of its dignity and beauty.
• It ensnares some in addiction.
• It deprives others of their sense of self-worth.
• It teaches our young people to settle for the cheap satisfactions of lust, rather than to do the hard, yet ultimately liberating and fulfilling, work of love."

One hotel chain, Marriott, informed us that they were "phasing out" offerings of pornography in their hotel rooms.

Another, Hilton, defended its participation in the pornography business by appealing, dubiously in our view, to libertarian principles.

Others, so far as we can tell, have ignored our plea.

We wish to reiterate that plea here, however, by holding up to the American hotel executives the highly laudable actions of Petter Stordalen, owner of Nordic Hotels, one of Scandinavia's largest chains.

Mr. Stordalen, after becoming involved in international efforts to fight the horrific practice of trafficking women and girls into sexual slavery, announced that pornography would no longer be offered to his customers. In a public statement explaining his decision.

"The porn industry contributes to trafficking, so I see it as a natural part of having a social responsibility to send out a clear signal that Nordic Hotels doesn't support or condone this, he said.

He's right.

The pornography industry is corrupt through and through—inherently so. It should come as no surprise that it is connected to something as exploitative, degrading, and dehumanizing as human trafficking.

Bravo to Petter Stordalen for refusing to continue profiting from peddling the industry's wares. Continue reading

Image: Communio