With the growing pervasiveness of pornography comes a greater comfortability with nudity at increasingly younger ages — a concerning issue for parents trying to protect their children.
One particularly disturbing trend is the rise in self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM), that is, pictures or videos underage children are taking of themselves and sharing with their peers or adults. In just one year’s time, from 2019 to 2020, the number of children ages 9-12 years old who perceive it as normal to share nude pictures and videos with each other jumped from 13% to 21%.
Listen to the latest episode of CBN’s Quick Start podcast
The study, conducted by Thorn, a nonprofit fighting child exploitation, found an even higher percentage of 9- to 12-year-old boys (26%) see the illegal trend as commonplace.
Elizabeth Fisher Good, an expert advocate against sex trafficking and founder of The Foundation United, told CBN’s Faithwire one of the root causes of this escalating issue is pornography.
“Our children are being taught by the world, and it is not pretty,” said Good, emphasizing how critical it is for Christians to proactively address this issue in their homes and their communities.
She warned, “Hell is systemically coming after our children, systemically dismantling the ability for intimacy, for family. If we don’t do something, in one decade, everything will be different — and we have the power as the church to speak to it.”
One of the most recent high-profile cases involving SG-CSAM quickly turned into a horrific cautionary tale. In February 2021, Serena Fleites — a teenager coerced as a minor by a then-boyfriend into sharing sexually explicit videos that ultimately ended up on Pornhub, the world’s largest pornography site — testified before Canadian lawmakers about the trauma she endured as a result of those videos spreading across the internet like wildfire.
She was only in seventh grade when the boy she was dating told her that, if she truly cared about him, she would send him naked videos of herself. At the time, Fleites was only 13 years old.
Due to Pornhub’s infamous failure to regulate its content, those illegal videos were uploaded, downloaded, and re-uploaded to the site countless times before Fleites was able to get them removed.
Her story is just one of many more just like it.
Transparency is paramount to breaking the cycle of sexual abuse and thwarting dangerous habits like pornography consumption, explained Good, noting research from Columbia University showing the average person carries with them 13 secrets, five of which they’ve never shared with anyone.
As a survivor of sexual abuse — first by a same-sex peer as a child and later by a worship leader — Good, a former pastor and author of “Groomed: Overcoming the Messages That Shaped Our Past and Limit Our Future,” struggled for years to open up about the ways she had been exploited. Those secrets, she said, fed a pattern of abuse that lasted for years.
It’s those experiences that led Good to launch The Foundation United’s Speak Up initiative, a curriculum parents, schools, and churches can employ to make conversations about oft-uncomfortable topics — like sex trafficking, sexual abuse, and pornography — more natural and accessible.
“Predators are not original,” Good said. “The way they come after our children is textbook, and we have tools now for parents that make it so easy for the church, for schools, training for everybody to just — as the church — take the lead. And we have to enter this conversation, lead it, speak to it intelligently and not as if it’s taboo because, you know what, your kids are on the school bus every day and whoever’s educating them is not pretending that it’s taboo.”
Christians, she added, “need to get in the ring and take this on.”
You can watch our full conversation with Good in the video below:
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN
