Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was 9, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her parents knowing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time something more extreme. By 10 it seemed normal. By 11, she was watching regularly on her own. She is calm about this, reassuring you that this has happened to most of her friends.
Would anyone think this was normal? Part of coming of age, her healthy development? Exploring her sexuality? Or would we call this abuse?
This is exactly what is happening to children today when we hand them a smartphone. But instead of one stranger introducing them to porn, it is a billion-dollar industry, profiting from their trauma.
These days we talk a lot about trauma. We worry about the impact of words; we agonize about our parenting; we inspect every inch of our childhoods. But one trauma being tragically ignored, potentially lasting trauma, changing the minds and souls of children, is porn.
By porn I mean what Common Sense Media calls any content showing “nudity and sexual acts intended to entertain and sexually arouse the viewer,” like videos of people having sex. Today, in the U.S., the average age of first exposure is 12. And this does not just happen on dedicated porn sites. Parents can block those all they want, or trust their children would never go there, but many access this content on Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord, Twitch, and TikTok. Many stumble across it accidentally.
