I received this message from the Family Research Council:
Dear Pastor Gaston,
In fact, Dr. Patrick Fagan of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute here at the FRC has just produced a comprehensive overview of the latest research in which he clearly demonstrates how pornography generates numerous negative outcomes for individuals and families. Here are some of the report’s critical findings about pornography:
- About 25 percent of those who go on the Internet do so for sexual purposes.
- Up to 90 percent of youth aged 15 to 17 reported accidentally coming across pornography online. About one quarter of these youth said this happens “somewhat or very often.”
- The more often adolescents are exposed to sexually explicit material on the Internet, the more sexually uncertain they are.
- Adults who steadily consume pornography are three times as likely to be unfaithful to their spouses.
- In one study, 56 percent of divorce cases involved an obsessive interest in pornographic websites, and 33 percent involved excessive time in chat rooms (a commonly sexualized forum).
- Repeated exposure to pornography prompted respondents to consider engaging in “recreational sex” as important, and to be very accepting of sexual permissiveness.
- The use of Internet pornography makes participants almost four times more likely to engage in paid sex.
- A recent study of college freshmen found that habituation to pornography led to tolerance of sexually explicit material, requiring more novel or bizarre material to achieve the same level of arousal or interest.
- Internet sexual offenders report that more than 11 hours of their week is spent viewing pornographic images of children on the Internet.
- Pornography consumption is closely related to sexual aggression.
For more on this report check out this link:
The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Families, and Community
