When Ben Williams turned ten, his parents bought him an iPod touch. That’s how his porn addiction began.
Ten was when he started to really notice girls, one of many changes that his family never discussed. Sex, puberty, or crushes didn’t come up in conversation at home or at his church, where both his parents volunteered. He had plenty of questions but no answers, so one night alone in his room, he turned to Google.
After a few weeks of searching images of the human body, he landed in what should have been adults-only spaces.
At first, Williams “didn’t know what I was looking at and didn’t really understand what it was.” He didn’t even know the word pornography the first time he watched it. He felt disgusted and confused but also excited, aroused, and curious to see more.
By the time his parents upgraded him to an iPhone two years later, Williams was viewing pornography compulsively every week, sometimes every night. This secret struggle followed him into adulthood and caused issues in dating, relationships, and his faith.
Williams’s story is hardly unique. The average age of exposure is 12, with more than half of kids reporting the encounter was accidental. Experts expect that the age will trend even younger with more access to devices.
Parents eager to protect their children from pornography have some reinforcements on the way: Last month, the Supreme Court sided with states that require pornography websites to verify users are at least 18. Christians and child welfare advocates celebrated the decision, saying it paves the way for states to implement laws to safeguard children from accessing adult material online.
It’s gotten harder for parents to keep their children from exposure to online pornography as more technology puts kids just a click or a command away from inappropriate content.
“I can make decisions in my household to keep them off smartphones or social media or put filters on our, you know, home device. But if they can still go to school and a child can still pull up Pornhub on their smartphone, that’s a collective problem,” said Clare Morell, who directs the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Technology and Human Flourishing Project.
In her book The Tech Exit, Morell encourages parents to keep kids and teens off smartphones—an increasingly countercultural position.
In the era of Google, TikTok, and Snapchat, porn-addiction ministries see ages of exposure tick younger, with kids watching clips pulled up on friends’ phones in the lunchroom or on the playground. Williams—now the director of a Christian recovery organization called 423 Next—said many people they work with were first exposed between 6 and 12 years old.
“‘Hey, guys, look what I found,’” Williams said. “You know, a group of six boys just all around the phone watching pornography, that tends to be the most common.”
423 Next uses a model of faith-based community and accountability for those struggling with addiction. Those same factors helped Williams recover from his own addiction in college when he was 20.
“The way I like to think about it is social media—and just broader media at large—had been grooming me my whole life to be prepared for pornography, to have my sexuality weaponized against myself, to view something that is an obvious distortion from God’s design and what is right,” Williams said.
Childhood encounters can lead to a lifelong struggle; his ministry also works with men in their 50s, 60s, or 70s who seek help after someone has discovered their covert porn addictions.
Unprotected from Porn, a report from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies found that “underage pornography use is now the norm, rather than the exception”—a particularly concerning trend as online videos depict increasingly “violent … and deviant” sexual content.
This is not the first time the judicial system has wrestled with restrictions on porn access, but it is the first time the justices favored the state’s compelling interest in protecting children from obscene online content.
In 2003, the Supreme Court’s Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union struck down a federal bill, the Child Online Protection Act. The court held that the law was unconstitutional for not being narrowly tailored in its attempts to criminalize certain online content. The law imposed a steep fine and 6 months in prison to anyone who, for commercial reasons, posted content online that would be harmful to children, unless they tried to bar their content from minors by requiring a credit card or other “measures that are feasible under available technology.” An earlier decision in 1997, Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, also sided with adult websites in striking down a section of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that made it a crime to display “patently offensive” adult material to minors. The justification was that the clause was overbroad and restricted free speech.
“It’s been a fight for as long as there has been a deployed commercial internet,” Wesley Hodges, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person. said. “Access for children to porn [has] simply reached a critical level that would not have been conceived at the time of Reno and Ashcroft, those early decisions, on pornography and obscene material.”
This time, the Supreme Court agreed with a federal appeals court that Texas attorney general Ken Paxton was right to enforce a state law requiring pornography websites to verify visitors’ ages before allowing access. The 6–3 decision, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, fell along ideological lines.
Texas’ law, House Bill 1181, passed in 2023, requires websites to use age-verification technology if more than a third of the content on their platforms is “sexual material harmful to minors.” It was initially blocked by a district judge, then allowed to go into effect (with one part of the law struck down), causing some adult websites, like Pornhub, to suspend services in the state.
In last month’s ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas said that adults “have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification, and the statute can readily be understood as an effort to restrict minors’ access. Any burden experienced by adults is therefore only incidental to the statute’s regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment.”
Thomas described a “compelling” state interest to protect children from sexual material.
Morell said the ruling “really serves to back parents up.” It also brings the digital marketplace more in line with brick-and-mortar stores, which are required to confirm the age of those buying adult magazines or other adult content.
Currently, 24 states have passed laws requiring some kind of age verification to access pornography online. Many of them are modeled similarly to Texas’ law, though the mechanics on how verification works differ.
“The court’s historic decision will shield other state laws protecting kids online from legal challenges and embolden more states to follow suit,” said Brad Wilcox, one of the authors of the Unprotected from Porn report.
Hodges said the decision rightly recognizes that the technology has changed. Age verification can be done in a cost-effective and privacy-preserving way, he argued.
“Twenty years ago, the users accessing obscene sites, gambling, you name it, would be right to worry that they are susceptible to data breaches,” he said. “Today, that is simply not an inevitability.”
Hodges cautioned that parents shouldn’t see age verification as a fail-safe—“There’s always going to be some way to circumvent [them]”—but it’s a long-overdue step in the right direction.
“More than 20 years in the making and, you know, it’s a decision that parents and pastors have been dreaming about.”
Chris McKenna, founder of the kids tech-safety organization Protect Young Eyes, cautioned that parents in states with age verification should still be vigilant about doing what they can to safeguard their children’s devices and delay giving kids social media and smartphones.
McKenna, a former youth pastor, worked on the Texas bill in 2023 with its original sponsor Angela Paxton, a state senator (who recently filed for divorce from the attorney general Ken Paxton).
McKenna wants Christians to reach out to policymakers at the state and federal level to advocate for similar state laws. “We have our first ruling in two decades from any branch of government,” he said. “We should celebrate that … and we need to keep the gas on.”
