Pornography and Digital Safety

We often receive calls from schools requesting resources to help their students struggling with pornography, sexting, and digital safety. The average age of first exposure to pornography today is 8-years-old. And this is a reality for families in our parishes – 79% of men and 76% of women aged 18-30 self-report that they view pornography at least once a month.

There is help available, and we’ve compiled a list below of the best organizations we have found to help schools, parents, and parishioners navigate these tough topics.

For Parents and Teachers:

Start by reading this article by Matt Fradd on how to talk to young people about viewing porn – Parenting the Porn Generation

 

Prevention Tools for Parents

• Talk to your kids about the gift of sexuality – Diocese of Arlington
• Tools for Parents in the Internet Age – Diocese of Lincoln
• Protect Young Eyes – Digital and Smartphone Safety
• Bark – This kid-friendly parental control app helps you monitor your child’s phone including social media, text, and new apps, alerting you of threats such as suicidality, sexting, cyberbullying, pornography, and more. Plus, parents don’t have to scroll through
• iGuardian online  – Projects include NetSmartz for parents, NSTeens for adolescents, and NetSmartzKids  for children. A guide for downloading and torrenting safety is also available.
• Internet Safety 101  – This program offers education on safety for youth. Topics covered include smartphone safety, social media, online gaming, pornography, cyber bullying, predators and trafficking, and general safety and prevention.
• CyberSecurityOne has a comprehensive list of resources for parents to protect their kids and teens from cyberbullying, scams, abuse and pornography.
• Covenant Eyes – Covenant Eyes is an excellent accountability and filtering software. This allows parents to monitor their kid’s internet activity, helps adults reduce internet temptations and enables everyone to maintain strong relationships.
• Circle – This is a new software from Disney that allows parents to filter sites for their children and turn off internet access at certain hours.

 

Helping Kids After Porn Exposure

• Protect Young Minds – protect your kids and help them heal from porn exposure
• When Children View Pornography – Focus on the Family

Resources for Youth and Young Adults

• The Culture Project
  Our office underwrites these young adult missionaries to speak for free in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to 6th-12th grade and young adults about sexual integrity and human dignity. Schedule them to speak to your church or school!
• Fight the New Drug
  Fight the New Drug is the best secular resource offering verified scientific research, articles, and excellent social media campaigns to show how porn harms individuals. Their signature campaign slogan is Porn Kills Love.

Further Reading

The Porn Effect | LifeTeen  | Chastity Project | The Young Catholic Gentleman all have great articles for young people on pornography and healing.

Recovery Apps

• The Victory App
  Victory App was created by LifeTeen and Matt Fradd to help young people overcome pornography addiction.
• Fortify App
  Fortify is Fight the New Drug’s app to help teens and adults overcome porn addiction.

 

Counseling

• Integrity Restored
  Integrity Restored offers counseling for individuals who need more intensive help overcoming an addiction to pornography.
• CatholicPsych
  Catholic Psych is another wonderful resource that offers online counseling for people, and they have worked with many individuals struggling with pornography addiction.

Educate Yourself and Your Parish with Angelus News Articles:

• What’s the most convincing argument against porn? Science
• Internet porn is the ‘neon coliseum’ of the digital age, expert says
• What can priests do practically to combat the porn epidemic?
• Porn leaves men dissatisfied with real relationships, study finds
• Struggle with porn? The Church can help you, US bishops say
• The new celibacy: How porn may be destroying the impetus for sex
• Not your grandpa’s porn – Has the Church caught up to the problem?
• Talking to kids about porn and sexuality
• How to fix our broken sexual culture, according to Archbishop Chaput

USCCB Statement:

Create in Me a Clean Heart is the USCCB’s statement on pornography for the Year of Mercy . It’s a beautiful document and well worth the read.​​