Did you know that at least 30% of web traffic is pornography? That an estimated 50% of Christians views porn? We need to pray about this and press into the Lord for freedom for the Church in this area.

[Pornography is] a public health crisis because it’s something that impacts individuals and families beyond their capacity alone to correct. So, you can be the most in-touch parents, reading all of the blogs, putting on all of the parental controls, talking to your kids about the harms of pornography, and you cannot stop your child from being exposed to pornography and from potentially becoming a regular user of pornography. . . . [P]eople can go and look up the research themselves. But the research is really clear that this has public health harms. And so, we think it’s important for us, as a society and for our states, to recognize that. . . .

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I think another thing that parents need to be aware of is the fact that in the age of social media, children are far more vulnerable to grooming for sexual abuse or sex trafficking than ever before.

If you were a sex trafficker 10, 20 years ago, you’d try to find someone in the mall, or you tried to catch them and start a relationship with them when they’re walking home from the [school] bus or something. But now, they can anonymously reach out to almost limitless [numbers of] kids with a few clicks of a button.

This isn’t like a hypothetical. … A couple months ago, I met with three young girls, 14, 15 years old, in Washington, D.C., who were sex-trafficking survivors. I mean, pause and think about that. To be a sex-trafficking survivor at the age of 14 and 15 is really traumatic.

They started showing me their Instagram accounts. Their Instagram accounts were set to private. So, everyone thinks that’s private, right? But no, they were still getting about a dozen or so messages from adult strangers, men, messaging them and able to message them . . .

So, this is a really big issue that parents really need to be aware of. You need to talk to your kids about their online experiences. Not about the danger of talking to strangers online, but also the importance of being able to say “no” to friend requests, or the importance of being able to say “no” if strangers or people start making you feel uncomfortable.

Because very often, there are these surveys of kids who said, “Well, this guy kept talking to me online, and I didn’t want to stop talking to him because that would be mean.”

Kids just want to be nice. They don’t realize the risks that are involved. . . .

[T]here are really so many different ways that this is seeping into our culture, and that’s why we made the Dirty Dozen List. And that’s the primary work that I do, our corporate advocacy, because we realize that these companies are having an impact on our culture.

Like, when Google doesn’t fix the search results, so that a child searching just the term “bondage” immediately turns up hardcore pornography. With a simple switch, they could have prevented that from happening to that kid.

It’s probably happening to more kids now as we speak. So, these corporate policies have a massive impact on society.

At dirtydozenlist.com, you can actually take action. You can sign petitions. You can send emails to executives. You can be part of social media campaigns. And the cool thing about it is that this actually works.

As a result of the Dirty Dozen List, we’ve gotten Hilton Hotels, Hyatt Hotels, Starwood and InterContinental Hotels Group to stop selling on-demand pornography in their hotels.

That impacts 2 million hotel rooms around the world, and is a big chunk of money out of the pornography industry’s budget, which I like.

Similarly, we got the Army, Air Force, and Navy to stop selling pornography on their bases. They [shouldn’t have] been doing that. Think of the sexual violence problem we have in the military, and yet, they were feeding it by selling it on their bases.

We got Google to stop linking ads to pornography or pornographic content. And there’s so many more victories that I could just talk about. I could fill up a lot of time just talking about that. But I think it’s important to let people know that there’s actually a lot of hope.

We actually do have some power to push back against how pervasive pornography has become in our culture today.

Excerpted from the Daily Signal. Listen to the entire Daily Signal Podcast interview with Haley Halverson, the vice president of advocacy and outreach at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation:

From an excellent article in World: Research continues to find that porn use, like any other addiction, numbs the senses and leads to an escalating need for more. Put another way, child sexual abuse consumers don’t always start as pedophiles. A 2018 study identified the most prevalent behavior pattern among 40 convicted child pornography users as “a progressive decrease in the age of the person depicted and a progressive increase in the severity of the sexual acts.”