Kids & the Other Addiction…….Porn

01-19-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Madi grew up in a religious home, blessed with attentive parents who took the dangers of technology seriously. They installed filters on her devices and required her to hand in her phone every night. Yet, when she was thirteen, she encountered pornography for the first time through her social media feed. She probed further, finding ways around the parental controls. Before long, she was in the throes of a porn addiction that lasted for five years. The paragraph above describes the depth of the porn addiction problem in our world and the effects of this addiction on young people. This was reported in First Things magazine.

You can find the whole article here. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2025/02/parents-cant-fight-porn-alone The depth of the problem is acknowledged in another statement, a quote from Madi: “Kids are seeing [porn] if they’re on social media or have any internet access; there is almost no way that they are not seeing pornography at least once a week, [even] once a day.” Bullet highlights from the article follow below:

-For the last twenty years lawmakers have done little about the porn-problem, chastened by a pair of devastating Supreme Court rulings in 1997 and 2004, which placed the rights of pornographers above those of children. Though the Court recognized that the government had a compelling interest in protecting children from exposure to pornography, it decided that the “the least restrictive means” to do so was to leave it to parents to employ porn filters.

-The ensuing quarter-century-long experiment on the most vulnerable members of society, with portals to pornography multiplying through smartphones, school-issued Chromebooks, and social media apps, has been an unmitigated disaster. As with all “rights” discourse, parents’ rights is a slippery concept, once unmoored from an objective sense of the right.

-The reality is that children’s welfare is not the concern of parents alone. The state has not only a right, but a duty to care for those citizens who cannot care for themselves. This includes not only orphans, but also those [children] who, while under the supervision of others, do not receive the minimum standards of care set by the state.” Among these minimum standards, we submit, is protection from pornography. The Supreme Court has already acknowledged that the protection of children from porn is a compelling state interest, and yet its leaving of protection solely to parents has meant in practice that the state does not ensure this standard of care

-Four arguments that may guide thinking more broadly concerning the intersection of parents’ rights and the state in regulating technology: 1) Digital technology inherently disempowers parents; 2) parental will does not always correspond to parental ability; 3) technologies pose collective action problems; 4) tasking parents alone with protection is a social injustice, as it leaves the most vulnerable children the least protected.

-Society has recognized that there are many experiences, products, and technologies that children should not be allowed to pursue—and some that even adults should not pursue, though adults may sometimes be left to the consequences of their own follies. But after 2000, the changes came fast: broadband internet, cheap laptops, smartphones, tablets, social media. “The average age of first smartphone ownership is now ten years. Parents were assured that “parental controls” left them in control, but even the most dedicated parents found the technological ground shifting beneath their feet.

-Parents today can, in theory, set up filters on their Wi-Fi routers, on their kids’ laptops, on their smartphones, and within individual apps. They can monitor their kids’ browsing, block known adult websites, or even use allowing access only to specific websites known to be safe.

-Children do not need to go looking for pornography; it finds them on social media. The porn industry has adopted the social media influencer model, with porn performers promoting their content on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and Instagram, in order to entice users (many of them minors) to click through to their own sites.

-Porn has a way of hacking the human brain, especially the adolescent brain, overwhelming its “reward” circuits with floods of dopamine, creating powerful feedback loops that leave the viewer hungry for more intense stimulation. The addictive properties of online porn rival those of powerful chemical substances. The World Health Organization now recognizes compulsive sexual behavior disorder (often induced by pornography) as a mental health disorder. Pornography’s addictive properties raise the stakes.

-Too often, portals to porn come in the form of friends. For many American children, the dark journey with pornography begins on the school bus, at recess, or even at youth group. Even when parents set up content-filtering regimes for their own families, they cannot control what other families in their communities are doing.

-But today, the law must correct outdated legal precedents and rectify our civilizational abdication to a porn industry that is exploiting technological developments to recruit and addict ever more and younger users. Children learn what is “normal” by watching one another. Today, too many think it is normal to watch porn over one another’s shoulders. We must use the law to support parents who want to protect their children from such poison but can’t do it on their own, and to correct and compensate for parents who shrug their shoulders.

-For too long, the legal regime surrounding pornography has left parents to fight alone against Big Tech and Big Porn. It has refused to recognize the exploitative behavior of these industries. But the government has a duty to aid parents in protecting minors from parties who mean them harm and from addictive substances and behaviors—and to protect those minors whose parents are unwilling or unable.

-To date, tech companies have feared prosecution for suppressing adult “speech” more than prosecution for allowing minors to view (or be featured in) pornography. Moreover, states that require pornography sites to age-verify send a message to society. A government that treats all content as presumptively available frames value judgments on pornography as a matter of mere consumer choice. It puts pornography in the same category as soft drinks.

-This link references laws in NY State designed to protect children online: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/20/24182396/newyork-governor-social-media-law-parental-consent-algorithms

2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials. Catechism of the Catholic Church

In Brief - 6th Commandment
2392 "Love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being" (FC 11).
2393 By creating the human being man and woman, God gives personal dignity equally to the one and the other. Each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.
2394 Christ is the model of chastity. Every baptized person is called to lead a chaste life, each according to his particular state of life.
2395 Chastity means the integration of sexuality within the person. It includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery.
2396 Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, pornography, and homosexual practices.
2397 The covenant which spouses have freely entered into entails faithful love. It imposes on them the obligation to keep their marriage indissoluble.
2398 Fecundity is a good, a gift and an end ( a goal) of marriage. By giving life, spouses participate in God's fatherhood.
2399 The regulation of births represents one of the aspects of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception).
2400 Adultery, divorce, polygamy, and free union are grave offenses against the dignity of marriage.

In Brief - 9th Commandment
2528 "Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Mt 5:28).
2529 The ninth commandment warns against lust or carnal concupiscence.
2530 The struggle against carnal lust involves purifying the heart and practicing temperance.
2531 Purity of heart will enable us to see God: it enables us even now to see things according to God.
2532 Purification of the heart demands prayer, the practice of chastity, purity of intention and of vision.
2533 Purity of heart requires the modesty, which is patience, decency, and discretion. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person.