Journal: Christian Apologetics Journal
Volume: CAJ 12:1 (Spring 2014)
Article: The Internet Pornography Pandemic: “The Largest Unregulated Social Experiment In Human History”
Author: Donna Rice Hughes

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The Internet Pornography Pandemic:
“The Largest Unregulated Social Experiment In Human History”1

Donna Rice Hughes2

(October 27, 2014, slightly corrected and revised)

Donna Rice Hughes is the President and CEO of Enough Is Enough (EIE), a secular, not–for–profit, non–partisan 501(c)3 organization whose mission is to make the Internet safer for children and families.

Technology is revolutionizing our lives and providing access to a wide range of valuable services. The Internet has become a powerful educational and communications tool, placing vast new worlds of knowledge in the palm of our hand. Today’s youth have fully integrated

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the Internet into their daily lives, using technology as a powerful platform for education, communication, interaction, exploration, and self–expression. The Internet opens its users to a world that is reflective of contemporary human life, providing access to what is good, beneficial, and beautiful, but when unrestricted, it opens doors to what is ugly, depraved, dangerous, and criminal.

The continuous invasion of graphic, hard–core online pornography into cultures worldwide has been called the “largest unregulated social experiment in human history”3 and represents a hidden public health hazard we should not ignore. In 2010, the Witherspoon Institute released “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations,”4 the first multifaceted, multidisciplinary, scholarly review of contemporary pornography since the advent of the Internet. The report’s findings conclude that pornography, especially via the Internet, harms children, women, and men and fuels pornography addiction, the breakdown of marriage, and sex trafficking. Other peer–reviewed studies have reached similar conclusions. Although much could be said about each of these conclusions, the focus of this article is to examine the impact of Internet pornography on young people.

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The History

For almost twenty years, children have been spoon–fed a steady diet of hard–core pornography via the Internet, with few laws or barriers to entry. Any child with open Internet access is just a click away from viewing, either intentionally or accidentally, sexually exploitive material, ranging from adult pornography (the kind of images that appear in Playboy and Penthouse) to prosecutable obscenity depicting graphic sex...