U.S. SUPREME COURT PROTECTS THE INNOCENCE OF CHILDREN
1. The Internet “transformed pornography consumption.”1 That transformation affords minors
• portable access to pornography at nearly any place, at any time
• a seemingly anonymous user experience that encourages exploration for material they could not find in traditional media
• the ability to privately access content that is much more difficult for parents to monitor and supervise than traditional media exposure
• a more visually stimulating, interactive, and engaging viewing experience that may lead to increased exposure time and deeper learning
• vast quantities of free pornography because major online distributors of pornography rely, in part, on a “freemium” profit model that purposefully entices consumers with free content while charging for “premium,”
and
• limitless novelty, an important factor since novel sexual material has been repeatedly shown to trigger greater sexual responses than familiar material.4
2. Pornography now permeates the lives of minors.
• In 1967, a survey of US college students aged 17 – 24 found that 88% of females and 53% of males had never seen a pornographic film.
• In 2016, a nationally representative survey of US youth aged 14 – 18 found 48.6% had viewed pornography (38.7% females; 58.5% males).
• In 2022, a survey of 1,353 youth aged 13 – 17 found 73% had consumed pornography (70% females, 75% males); 15% of those exposed were 10 years or younger when they first saw pornography; 54% were 13 years old or younger. Only 32% of all teens indicated that their families utilized content filters or parental controls at home to prevent their access to pornography.
3. Pornography use is associated with wide-ranging attitudinal and behavioral harms.
• Permissive Sexual Attitudes: A meta-analysis which evaluated more than 70 reports across 40 decades of research with a total of 45,507 participants found that greater pornography consumption “was a robust predictor of more impersonal sexual attitudes” “Among both adolescents and adults, and across cultures and time. . . .”
• Early Sexual Debut: Twenty longitudinal studies published between 2003 – 2014 (some pertaining to traditional media and others solely to pornography) have identified an increased risk of early sexual intercourse with exposure to sexual content at a young age.
• Casual or Impersonal Sex: Research—cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental—convincingly supports
the existence of a pornography consumption to casual sexual behavior pathway.10 A meta-analysis which evaluated more than 70 reports across 40 decades of research from 13 countries and behavioral results from more than 60,000 participants found that greater pornography consumption “was a robust predictor of engaging in impersonal sexual behavior.”
• Condomless Sex: A meta-analysis including data spanning two decades from 18 countries and more than 35,000 adolescent and adult participants found higher pornography consumption was associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in condomless sex among both males and females.11 The study found that pornography use “energizes consumers’ sensation seeking desires, in turn making them more likely to engage in condomless sex,” rather than condomless sex being spurred by desire for novel and intense feelings and experiences
(i.e., sensation seeking).
• Greater Number of Lifetime Sex Partners: A longitudinal study of US adolescents found that those with early and regular pornography use trajectories had nearly double the number of sex partners compared to low- to moderate use peers.13 The authors noted that this finding refutes the “catharsis hypothesis” which argues that pornography consumption may replace the need for romantic or sexual partners, which would result in fewer sex partners.
• Group Sex: Pornography use is associated with greater likelihood of participating in “group sex” (sexual activity involving three or more people simultaneously). A cross-sectional study of 328 females aged 14 – 20 years found that while only 7.3% had ever had a group sex experience, past-month pornography exposure increased the prevalence of group sex by 4.75 times.
4. Pornography use is associated with increased child-on-child harmful sexual behavior.
• A systematic review and meta-analysis of 27 studies published up to September 2021 (conducted in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa) explored the role of exposure to sexual content in problematic sexual behaviors (PSB) among children and adolescents (n=16,200, mean age=14.26). Results indicated that children and adolescents exposed to sexual content are more than 1.5 times more likely to engage in PSB than those not exposed, and children and adolescents exposed to violent sexual content are approximately 2.5 times more likely to engage in PSB than those not exposed.
5. Pornography use is associated with increased risk of engaging in prostitution.
• A cross-sectional survey exploring the sexual behavior of 4,600 people aged 15– 25 years from the Nether- lands found that both young women and men with greater pornography use were more likely to have ever been paid something, or to pay something, to someone for sex even after controlling for a variety of factors such as sex, age, religion, education, and more.
#StopthePornExperiment #ProtectKidsNotPorn
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