The sad reality is that exposure to pornography is now nearly universal, even among Christian teens. As young boys develop, they are intensely curious about what a naked woman looks like. When all it takes are two clicks of the mouse, there are few boys who will resist. After experiencing a tremendous rush, they are inevitably drawn back, time and time again. And once they’ve seen a naked woman, they wonder, “What does sex look like?” and graduate from pictures to videos.
Pornographers who exploit the web keep inventing new ways for teens to access sexually explicit material, often in ways that parents find nearly impossible to monitor. For instance, file sharing, if erased after viewing, leaves no trace, and none of the most popular filters catch or report file sharing. When we eventually learn to monitor this, you can count on pornographers finding other ways—for instance, downloading video onto iPods and cell phones.
Parents need to be made aware of the latest “threshold” on the Internet, which now is file sharing. If you have Limewire or Kazaa programs on your computer, and you didn’t put them there, it’s likely that your son has already been viewing explicit images. The church is in great need of technically savvy people who can keep parents informed of new and expanding temptations.
Second, youth leaders should assume that this is an active and ongoing temptation in most, if not all, of their boys. Regular forays through books such as Every Young Man’s Battle are now an essential component for a strong youth program.
Above all, we can’t just give in and assume that pornography will become a part of our children’s lives. Its effects are too harmful and pervasive for us to be either ignorant or passive in confronting this challenge.
