How Rampant Explicit Material Is Poisoning the Minds of America’s Children | Kristen Jenson

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Pornography is like a silent epidemic … but nobody wants to talk about it much,” says child protection advocate Kristen Jenson.

She’s the author of the “Good Pictures Bad Pictures” series of read-aloud books that teach children how to recognize and reject pornography.

In America, kids are encountering porn at younger and younger ages—often without their parents knowing, Jenson says. Once a child has a smartphone, it is only a matter of time until the child is exposed to porn—often by other children. And it’s having a devastating impact on their impressionable young minds, Jenson says.

“Every school bus in America is a triple X theater because children are showing pornography to other children in buses. I’ve heard so many stories of five-year-olds getting shown hardcore pornography on a school bus,” she says.

Retroactive studies found that the average age kids first view pornography is around 11 years old, but Jenson concluded from her work and research that the average age is much lower.

In our in-depth interview, she walks me through many aspects of porn consumption and how children are impacted by it: How does porn affect children’s overall development and their chances of meaningful sexual relationships later on in life? How does porn affect children’s mental health? How does it affect their sexual health? Do children get addicted to porn? How are girls impacted by porn? How do sexual predators use porn as a grooming tool for kids?

Violent porn, in particular, is a huge problem in itself, Jenson said. By the age of 18, the vast majority of teenagers—about 80 percent—have been exposed to violent porn: “That’s the main fare out there. It’s violent porn. It’s hitting, it’s slapping, hair-pulling, strangling.”

Many children’s perception of sex is poisoned by violent pornography. She told me a story of a girl who was kissed by her 12-year-old boyfriend for the first time: “And he strangled her because that’s what he’d seen in porn.”

It is perhaps unsurprising then that there has been a steep increase in what is called child-on-child sexual abuse over the last decade. In fact, about 70 percent of all sexual child abuse cases are now child-on-child, she said: “Kids love to imitate. When you add in the factor of pornography … it is not surprising that some of these children want to go ahead and act out what they see in pornography,” Jenson says.

So what should parents do to protect their children?

Simply telling your children that porn is bad is not good enough, she said. Children need to be given three basic things: a vocabulary to talk about pornography, a warning against it, and a plan of what to do when they are exposed to it.

To help parents in this endeavor, she wrote her book series “Good Pictures, Bad Pictures.” These books, geared to different age groups, are meant as a tool to help parents with such conversations: “The point is to model parents talking to their children. It’s really important to open that conversation.”

“One of the most loving things that you can do for your child is to give them a defense against not only pornography, but all forms of sexual exploitation,” she says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Kristen Jenson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Ms. Jenson:

Thank you, Jan. It’s great to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s been my contention for a while that this ubiquitous use of pornography in our society is a huge, I don’t know, destructive force in the social fabric and specifically around children because of the availability of the internet basically on every screen practically. And this is the thing that you know most about. But explain to me the scope of this problem.

Ms. Jenson:

The scope is huge. Children are viewing pornography. They have so much access because they have devices that are connected to the internet. They have apps, social media, and they’re stumbling onto content. And the porn industry is not just sitting there waiting for kids to show up. They are actively pursuing them because if they can get them hooked, then of course, you know they’ve got lifelong members or lifelong, you know, people that are going to be watching and viewing and paying for premium subscriptions, etc.

Pornography really hurts children. You know, back in the 60s, Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring in which she said, look, this DDT is affecting the young, the little tadpoles and the eggs and the eggshells and all these things affecting the young. And that’s when we know we have a crisis and we have a public health crisis.

Mr. Jekielek:

Pornography is a public health crisis because it is affecting our children, but nobody seems to want to talk about it much, right? I don’t say, I shouldn’t say nobody, but you know, it’s something we don’t really want to admit how much pornography is harming and hurting our children in so many ways. Well, so let’s dive into that. Like, can you give me a sense of the scale? I mean, you, there must be some numbers out there on how many kids are affected, what ages they’re starting to look at, girls and boys.

Ms. Jenson:

So let’s talk about the age. You know, what age, what’s the average age that kids view pornography? When you look at retrospective studies, they come up with 11, 12, 13 years old. And these retrospective studies are done because you can’t go into 100 elementary schools and say, we’re going to talk to the kindergartners or the sixth graders and ask them if they’ve seen porn. So we’re not able to do that. We’re only able to ask older teens and young adults, when did you see pornography?

Mr. Jekielek:

And the reason you don’t ask, just to be clear, is because you’re kind of introducing it to them that way? Or why?

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, I don’t think you’d get permission. There’s an ethical, you know. Yes, of course. So to set up the gold standard study would be difficult. So they do retrospective studies. So one study in Jakarta said that of the fourth to sixth graders they were able to talk to, 97 percent of them had seen pornography. When you look at Common Sense Media’s study, they say 15 percent of kids under 10 had seen pornography. I think whenever you give a child a device, like a smartphone, pretty much that’s when they’re going to start seeing porn. And kids are getting these devices younger and younger. I believe that the average age is much younger than 11. So that’s one part of it.

When you think about a child and their development, their normal, natural development, pornography is really going to negatively impact their cognitive development. There are a lot of discussions about the mental health issues, but there are many studies that show that children who look at pornography have higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and lower self-esteem. And we’re seeing so much of this across the board—so much more depression, so much more anxiety in kids, body image issues, and premature sexualization, which leads to riskier and earlier sexual activity.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, let’s talk about that because I read a statistic that I found just absolutely horrifying. I’m sure you know it; I’ll get you to tell me, but just that a lot more of the sexual abuse that’s happening right now is children doing it to each other, and I just—I don’t even want to think about that. But explain that to me.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, child-on-child sexual abuse, and sometimes it’s called child-on-child problematic behavior, has skyrocketed. So when I first started talking about this issue, it was at 40 percent. And I thought that was really bad.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just wait, 40 percent of all child abuse?

Ms. Jenson:

40 percent of all reported child abuse cases were perpetrated by minors, by other children.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s been the case in the past? You’re saying it’s higher than that?

Ms. Jenson:

It’s now 70 percent.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what’s happened? You don’t think about that. I mean, you know, we think about child abuse; we think of it happening, and you know, we know it’s often adults that are related to the families and so forth, but you never think about the children doing it to each other.

Ms. Jenson:

Right, and it used to be some family member that was the predator. And that’s still the case when there is an adult predator. It’s usually someone known by the child. However, it has become children on children. That is the majority of the cases, and it’s fueled by pornography.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s just kind of break this down a little bit. This is just—every aspect of thinking about this is absolutely horrifying. But it’s not that probably most of these kids aren’t predators. I mean, let me state a few assumptions. I don’t know the issue at all, but they’re not. Are they just acting out what they saw in the films? Or are some of them being turned into these predators? Like, what’s happening?

Ms. Jenson:

So let’s talk a little bit about the brain of a child. Children are imitative, right? That’s how they grow up into adults, right? They imitate. And any parent knows this. They see their child imitating them, imitating how they talk, and what they do. Kids love to imitate. But when you add in the factor of pornography, now they’re seeing pornography. It is not surprising that some of these children want to go ahead and act out what they see in pornography. And we’re seeing that more and more and more.

So when I got started writing Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, the reason I got started doing it was because of a young man, a 17-year-old, who was sexually molesting his younger brothers and sisters, from the 14-year-old down to the four-year-old. And pornography was involved in all of that. I talked to him about six years later, and he told me that, you know, he’d gone into, in his state, there was a training program, a treatment program, so he was in this treatment program with eight other boys.

Now, one of them had a hands-on predator perpetrator, right? They had not been sexually abused by a person. It was porn. Porn was the perpetrator that got them to act out on their siblings, cousins, or other more vulnerable children. And that was years ago. So we see this over and over again where children, imitative, right, view pornography and act out on other children.

One woman in my area actually contacted me, and she told me how one summer, she was watching a 10-year-old boy in the neighborhood because his mother, a single mother, had to work. And you know, most of the summer was going by; everything was fine, he was playing well with her kids. Then one day, he took her seven-year-old daughter into the bathroom, shut the door, and started to try to do sexual things with her.

So this mother obviously found out and called the boy’s mother and told her what happened, and she broke down crying and said, three weeks ago, I found that my son was watching porn on the iPad, and so something is wrong. He’s fine, and then he starts watching porn, and then this happens. Now, you know, I can’t say, you know, yes, this caused this, but I have so many stories like this.

If you speak to anyone that’s in, for example, the people that are helping kids that act out sexually on other kids, they all will talk about pornography privately, right? No one seems to want to talk about it out in the open. Why? I don’t know. I would like to know that because I also have gone to child abuse prevention conferences, and you don’t hear a lot about pornography on the stage from their presenters, but if you talk to them in private, they will tell you, oh yeah, yeah, pornography is definitely a factor here, definitely a driver. I don’t know why.

Mr. Jekielek:

So this comports with my own kind of thoughts about this, which are not terribly educated. It’s just my sort of observation from having talked to lots of people. I suspect that a lot of adults are watching porn, and they don’t want to admit it because it’s shameful, obviously. But it’s just, I’ve learned a bit about how addictive many things in our society are, never mind things which are just kind of naturally deeply addictive like pornography itself, right, and I suspect it’s probably a large crisis in itself because if people shame this—and this is a hypothesis, obviously—right, because if people shame, they don’t want to talk about it. That’s because you tend not to want to talk about the things you’re ashamed of.

Ms. Jenson:

I agree.

Mr. Jekielek:

But there’s also this kind of idea out there that if you’re anti-porn, you’re sex negative, you know, and you’re kind of anti-sex. And I’m like, I think porn is sex negative. That’s horrifying. And you’re right. No, that makes perfect sense. But it wouldn’t have occurred to me until you said that. So somehow you have to sort of be, you know, appreciative of it. What a mind job.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes. I’ll tell you, I have many people come up to me and say, especially men, I wish my parents had had your book.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about it before you start talking about your book. So no, because you have written a fascinating book. I mean, there’s nothing else like it remotely that I— I mean, I looked, right, to see Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. Tell me about the book.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, so Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. I wrote when I found this friend of mine, whose son was sexually molesting his younger brothers and sisters. Porn was involved. So I went to look for a resource and couldn’t find anything. And I did a little more looking around on the internet, and I just figured, you know, we can boil this down for a seven-year-old. And so I wrote Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. The whole point is to model parents talking to their children. That’s really important to open that conversation and then to give kids a definition of what pornography is in an age-appropriate way.

So you could read this book to your children, even before you’ve kind of started those conversations about sex. So a definition, so they can recognize it. A warning, so they understand why it’s dangerous. It’s not good enough to just say, porn is bad, don’t look at it. So a warning about its harms. And in my original book, I talk a lot about how it becomes an addiction.

And then third, a plan. So they know exactly what to do when they see it. So a definition, a warning, and a plan all set in a conversation with a mother and a father who are open and explaining these things to their children because that’s what I want to see. I want to see parents doing that with their children. And then I have another book, Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Junior, and parents asked me to write it for younger children, which was a shock to me. But every kid’s on an iPad. I mean, every three-year-old’s on an iPad, and they need to be warned as well.

Mr. Jekielek

I just want to comment on this, too, because you cited two studies. I think the one in Indonesia was for fourth to sixth graders, and almost everybody had seen it. And the other one was 15 percent of those under 10. That’s still enormous. Whatever that is, and there’s, of course, a huge range in between that, and maybe there are cultural differences as well.

One of the things that strikes me here is, you know, as a parent, if you’re hearing, hey, there’s a book that you’re going to, you know, you’re kind of going to expose your kids to pornography or the threat of pornography or something. I mean, some parents might be thinking, hey, aren’t I going to start to groom my kid on pornography here or something, right? I mean, that’s a very legitimate question.

Ms. Jenson:

Absolutely. And parents do fear this. What if I start this conversation with my son or my daughter, and then I arouse their curiosity and they go out and look? And there are those kids that have to touch the hot stove, right?  But my argument is this: You have two choices. One is to cross your fingers, put your head in the sand, and hope your kid doesn’t ever see it until maybe after you finally get the courage to start talking about it, or to be proactive. And that first plan has not been working.

So to be proactive is to start and to open this conversation. It gives children a vocabulary, right? It makes you a safe person to talk about these things with. And if you do it right, there’s not going to be shame. There’s not going to be judgment. So even if your kid goes and runs out and touches the hot stove, first of all, um, it’s still safer because you’re still opening, continuing those conversations, continuing to educate that child, building a disposition of wanting to and knowing how to reject pornography and knowing why, right?

But by and large, the stories I hear are the stories that I started reading Good Pictures, Bad Pictures to my child, and they let me know they had already seen this kind of material. That is usually what happens, I would say. And kids are swimming in a sea of sexualized media. So I think it’s rare when a parent is the one that initiates that curiosity, and it’s not a friend of theirs at school. Because kids share this stuff on their phones with other kids.

Mr. Jekielek:

And I’m just, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a bit because so when I was one of these kids that had to touch the hot plate, even if you were told the hot plate touching the hot plate is bad, right? And the way I was exposed to pornography was there was a video store. They were VHS, you know, video tapes that came out at this time. And the store was just stupidly, you know, giving people like me who was I think I must have been like 11 or 12 whatever we wanted, and of course, we wanted the forbidden stuff.

And this is kind of the argument you know someone might give you, hey wait a second. No, kids are just going to go for about that forbidden stuff, but my own reflection on this is knowing from your parent what they think about something is still actually very helpful, even if you’re still enticed into the forbidden thing in the first place,

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, because you are opening this conversation, you are instilling your values about it, you are giving your strong reasons, you know, why you don’t want them to go in that direction. And that is worth a lot because ultimately as parents, we don’t have full control. We used to have a lot more control, but with digital devices, even if your kid doesn’t have a smartphone, the kids at school do, the neighbors do, you know. So you can’t control what your child does, but you can influence them.

Mr. Jekielek:

But you can do something with screens, though? I mean, your kids can go to schools where there’s no screens, for example. Or you can also restrict your kids’ screen use. And that probably would play a very important role, wouldn’t it? I mean, just your thoughts.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, my thoughts on filters and parental controls and all of that. And I think that’s all very important to do. Yes, definitely get your Wi-Fi filtered. Definitely get, you know, the parental controls on all the devices. I would say never give your kid a device. Have a family device that they can use. Give them access. Don’t give them a thing, right? Because there’s a different psychology there.

The important thing is that you are training them and you are giving them an internal filter, right? So you can have all these external filters and tech filters, and that’s important. However, once they go out the door, even if you have everything in your house locked down, which is still really hard because these kids are very clever, the minute they walk out the door, there’s no guarantee of any filter. The minute they go into a public library, there’s no filter, at least in my state. So I think that kids need an internal filter, and they need to know why.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re talking about morality. You’re talking about instilling morals in your children, basically, around these things.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes. Good information, and saying why this will lead, if you want to have. better mental health, if you want to have a happier, more intimate sex life. Honestly, when our kids get older, parents aren’t going to say out loud, I want my kid to have a great sex life. But you do at the right time with the right person in a committed relationship, you know, like marriage. That’s what you want.  But pornography is going to poison all that.

It’s going to, you know, infect the mind with these toxic sexual scripts that, you know, are self-centered, that are violent. All of the things that make a marriage beautiful and trusting, you know, and bring you closer, that’s the exact opposite of what you’re going to see and be taught in pornography. And the violence is horrible. So one study showed that by the time kids were 18, you know, and they’d seen porn, 79 percent had seen violent porn.

That’s the main fare out there is violent porn. It’s hitting, it’s slapping, hair pulling. A story about a girl that finally, you know, she got a kiss from her boyfriend at the age of 12, and he strangled her because that’s what he’d seen in porn. And you know, how are the kids going to grow up and be able to have happy, healthy relationships when their view of sex is so poisoned by pornography? It’s so performative, it’s commodified, and it’s objectification.

Mr. Jekielek:

Of course. And it’s so easy to stumble upon. I mean, I had this actually happen to me. I was at an event where there was someone speaking about their, I think it was actually, they were going to run for political office, and they shared their website, right? It was actually, it happened to be a woman who shared her website. I looked it up on my iPad, except somehow I wrote the wrong link. Suddenly, there was hardcore pornography playing on my iPad, which I was, you know, kind of cradling, hoping no one would notice. But it really hit me that this is how they prey on people.

I mean, never mind just children, adults, right? Like, I mean, there’s a weird kind of enticing thing about it, right? Like, you have to make a very conscious decision to say, no, this is not something I want. And you have to have good reasons. So if someone just says, oh, it’s bad, it doesn’t explain how harmful it can be to you. That can become an addiction. Let’s talk about the brain chemistry. What happens? Because this ties into the addiction piece.

Ms. Jenson:

In Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, Porn-proofing Today’s Young Kids, is where I lay out how pornography actually becomes an addiction, so that a seven-year-old can understand it. They find that things that are drugs, right, affect the dopamine in the brain. Dopamine comes over a neuron; there’s a synapse, and it’s thrown over to the other synapse. On this synapse, there are these little mitts catching the dopamine, right? But when you have a super stimulus like a drug, right, or pornography, even gambling, that is pushing so much dopamine over that neural connection, the brain is like, ah, too much dopamine, and it starts to shut down those receptors. Well, now what happens? Now you’re not getting that response.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that’s pleasure, right? Dopamine is sort the central.

Ms. Jenson:

It’s the seeking part of it; it’s the seeking part of the pleasure. So what happens is your mood comes down because then you need the fix to get it, right? You have to up the ante, right? So the next time you go and use your drug, you have to use more or something more potent, right?

With drinking, you might start with a beer and end up with vodka, you know, that kind of thing. Or with pornography, you might start with something pretty tame, but then that’s not doing it for you because dopamine and that process is the same in the brain. And especially if you’re using anything that you’re using to escape from a negative emotional state, it actually drives addiction even stronger, even more. So children will get into pornography many times to distract themselves from the negative things that are happening.

So addiction, really, it’s the same process, whether you’re taking a drug or you’re using a behavior. It’s really the same process in the brain. They’ve shown this; they’ve done MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] studies in Germany and in the UK, at prestigious universities, where they show, for example, that they bring in people who are using pornography compulsively, heavy users, and they show, for example, that their prefrontal cortex has shrunk. The shrinkage of this part of the brain is noted in all kinds of addictions. It’s also noted in behavioral addictions like pornography. The thing is that pornography use can become compulsive. Some people don’t want to say addicting, but the outcome is the same. You have to have it, and you have to have more of it to just keep a baseline.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think the fact that pornography is addictive, then the research that I’ve read is pretty well established. I think we can say it’s addictive. Okay, I think it’s addictive.

Ms. Jenson:

No, it’s absolutely addictive. There are people who still argue that, oh no, maybe it’s not. Why are they arguing this? Because the porn industry is funding a lot of studies trying to show that it’s just entertainment; it’s no problem at all. I mean, look at the, you know, back when tobacco, right? It took 7,000 studies before the government finally says, yes, this is, yeah, it’s probably causing lung cancer.

The thing is, when you do a study, and people who don’t want to say it’s an addiction, they’ll say, well, this is just a correlation. It’s not causation, you know, a correlation. It’s not causation, correlation. Well, you get so many correlation studies. And you do a study where the more you use, the more your brain is shrunk. That looks causal to me. So we are getting more and more studies about the harms of pornography.

Mr. Jekielek:

And there’s also the sexual dysfunction aspect, right? And then there’s also the horrifying thought about someone who hasn’t gone through puberty, or is, you know, how does that even work?

Ms. Jenson:

So if you start looking at pornography at a young age, the studies show that you are going to have a much higher risk for mental health problems, such as greater levels of depression and anxiety and suicide, lower self-worth, and all of those things. So it’s really important to protect young children. But as far as their future, it really can impact their future. And you mentioned sexual dysfunction.

So there’s this thing called porn-induced erectile dysfunction [ED]. And what happens is the brain gets so topped out on viewing pornography and maybe even fetishes, certain kinds, that when they’re with a real person, they cannot become sexually aroused. It just has stopped working and is a form of ED. What they find is that if they stop looking at pornography and stop using it, then they recover.

Mr. Jekielek:

I just want to comment here. I like how you talk about this; you’re a user of pornography. It’s not just like you’re watching a show or something like that. No, you’re a user.

Ms. Jenson:

You’re using it to get that pleasure, to get that arousal, and it works. It works in the short term. The problem is with everything that’s addicting, in the short term, having that drink might help you deal with a short-term problem. But, you know, my dad was an alcoholic, and it really ruined his life. So pornography, in the same way, ruins people’s marriages. It can ruin their job opportunities. It can ruin their families.

I can’t tell you how many people as adults come to me and say, I was shown pornography at seven. I was shown pornography at five, and I felt compelled to keep looking for it and looking for it. So children are being horribly hurt by pornography, and yet it just is being normalized. And what I want to say is this is not normal. Children should be protected; we should have better laws in place, obviously, but until we do, you know, we need to start giving kids a defense against pornography so that they can grow up healthy and have healthy relationships.

Mr. Jekielek:

The other thing that just struck me, we didn’t talk about—again, I was shocked. I sort of assumed it was more a boys’ issue, but it’s not just a boys’ issue. So tell me about that.

Ms. Jenson:

So one survey I recently looked at was that 44 percent of women look at pornography. Pornhub, if you want to believe them, says 39 percent of visitors are women. But I don’t think they’re taking into account all of the porn that is read. Women tend to get into porn through reading because they’re very relationship-oriented.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like kind of extreme romance novels or something?

Ms. Jenson:

They are very relationship-oriented. So they’ll read spicy romance, but also just outright porn.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like the 100 Shades of Grey, was that the film?

Ms. Jenson:

50 Shades of Grey. There were three of them, and that was a huge success.

Mr. Jekielek:

But that was the idea. That’s what you’re talking about. That kind of—it’s sort of a weird sadomasochism light.

Ms. Jenson:

It can start that way. And I think you have talked to Anna Lemke, the Dopamine Nation author.

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely. I keep thinking about her work as we’re speaking here.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes. She tells about her own story of getting hooked on reading these kinds of books on her Kindle and having to realize that this was becoming an addiction just like she treated in other people, and she had to pull back because it was really affecting her life. So yes, girls receive deep wounds from pornography, and they’re more ashamed because we have this cultural myth that all girls, you know, aren’t interested in sex. Let me tell you, they are.

But when they see the violent porn, the violence is mostly aimed at women. And the most disgusting, degrading kinds of acts that are happening to women, this is just common. And so, yes, when women see that, and then it normalizes it. Well, that must just be normal. That must be what I can expect. Girls are being sexually abused, not realizing that is what’s happening. Because, oh, well, that’s just what I see in porn.

Why are we teaching all these girls to accept sexual violence? Studies that include women show that the women are even more affected; their mental health is even more negatively impacted by pornography than the men. So that’s why I wrote my Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Guide for Girls.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, that’s one I haven’t seen yet.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes. It’s just coming out. It has a whole chapter on objectification. It’s the same format as the original, so it’s a conversation, but there’s a lot more kind of girl-friendly anecdotes. We talk about these books. These books make pictures in your mind, so it’s just as powerful as, you know, watching a video. And then we talk also; we have advice for parents about sexting because that makes girls so vulnerable. And yet, you know, girls feel pressured to do these kinds of things in their teen years and even younger.

So, yes, girls are vulnerable. And sometimes girls are even more vulnerable than boys because parents are like, well, I think I really want to make sure my boy isn’t looking at this. So maybe we’ll just give him a flip phone or, you know. But I’ll hand my, you know, 12-year-old or 11-year-old a full-on smartphone, iPhone, whatever, because she’ll be fine. And she’s not fine. She is not fine.

Mr. Jekielek:

So something just occurred to me. You know, looking at our kids have, you know, screens, we’re just beginning to realize seriously how big a problem the screens themselves are. And all the non-pornography stuff that’s on the screen, the impact, I mean, it’s just devastating, right? This feels like a sort of augmentation of the damage or something like that that you’re describing. But there’s also just the places where people will encounter this are places that you might not imagine.

Like I was looking at one case study, which was, you know, Roblox, which is like, you know, just a normal game where you build. So you can build scenarios and things like that, and probably millions of kids are using it, I don’t know, but you can also build really horrible scenarios apparently, so maybe tell me about that and just some of the different ways that might be unexpected, yeah, yeah, that they might encounter it.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, so anywhere there’s a screen, kids can get to pornography, and pornography can get to them. So with Roblox, I think what parents don’t always recognize is that Roblox is not just a kid’s game. It is a platform, kind of like YouTube, right, where people can build all kinds of games on there. And many of the games on Roblox are absolutely not for kids. They’re sexual. They’re called sex condos. And kids, you know, there’s no iron gates, so they can get on there and see people being raped and all kinds of things on Roblox.

So I’d be very careful with any game where a predator can also use messaging and can basically talk to your kid. That’s very dangerous. I think the FBI a couple of years ago put out a warning saying that on these video games like Roblox, they had these professional predators basically coming in pretending to be other kids, identifying a victim, and then normalizing sharing, you know, nudes and getting the kid o this.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is grooming; it’s extortion.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, it’s grooming, and then it can lead to sextortion.

Mr. Jekielek:

Sextortion meaning you get a compromising image, and then you..

Ms. Jenson:

And then they want money. Now this often happens with older teens that have more disposable or access to money. But even getting a kid to give pictures, that is a form where they are giving pictures and then they’re threatened, and then they give more.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, and they can be blackmailed into doing things.

Ms. Jenson:

To doing a video. And people like these videos. So they get kids to do them. It’s total exploitation. And it can begin on these video platforms. So if I were a parent of a young child today, I would never let my child on a game, no matter how much peer pressure there is, where the whole world can get at them. I would make sure there are games, I think Minecraft is one where you can have your own little server and limit who is on that game.

So there are some games that are much safer. And, you know, we have information about that on our Defend Young Minds website as well. But, yeah, so access, so games. Anytime a kid has access to social media. One study in the UK found that kids were really getting to porn through X, through Twitter. The Snapchat messaging app has really become a full-on social media.

Mr. Jekielek:

I had to, you know, on X, on that point, this is an interesting point. I don’t know how it is now, but I had to turn on my, there’s a setting for no adult content or something. It’s problematic because there are things that you want to see that would be only for adults if you turn it off. But literally looking for very non-porn things, I would routinely suddenly see something, and you’re trying frantically to get rid of it. It was kind of shocking. Frankly, it hasn’t happened in a while, but I think it’s because I put the setting on.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, you can put the setting on, but if a kid has their own social media, like they can just take it off.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, of course.

Ms. Jenson:

So social media, messaging apps, anywhere there’s a screen, Spotify, music apps, and other children. That’s why I say every school bus in America is a triple-X theater because children are showing pornography to other children on playgrounds and buses. I’ve heard so many stories of five-year-olds getting shown hardcore pornography on a school bus. But children, if you teach them what to do, they will respond, and you can help them.

There was a mother that put up on Facebook that her nine-year-old, she read him Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. He went to school. Three days later, you know, somebody came up with a phone, one of his classmates showed him pornography. And, you know, he recognized it, and he went home and he told his mom, he said, I was scared, but I knew what to do. Every child deserves to know what to do when they see porn because they can’t just, like, it’s not easy for them to deal with it if they haven’t been prepared.

Mr. Jekielek:

Can you walk through with me kind of, you know, short form, as if you were reading to me the book, okay? Just walk through it. I’m the kid.

Ms. Jenson:

You’re the kid, all right. There are good pictures like we have on our photo album or we have on our phones or good pictures of our vacations and time with friends, but there are also bad pictures. Bad pictures are called pornography, and they involve pictures, videos, even cartoons, or descriptions of people with little or no clothing on. Have you seen any of these bad pictures?

Mr. Jekielek:

But so I’m going to be in character here for a moment saying, well right, but we had some of those pictures from the beach the other week.

Ms. Jenson:

Oh, pictures of people with swimsuits on, yes. Hopefully the swimsuits were covering their private parts, but in pornography, those parts are for everyone to see. And we’re not talking science books, right, but we’re talking pictures and videos that show the private parts of the body. And sometimes seeing those pictures can feel like the pull of a giant magnet, but there are problems when we, you know, start to look and seek after those pictures because it can actually hurt the brain and hurt the way we see other people, so it’s important that we see other people as humans and not as objects. It’s also important that we protect our brain from addiction because looking at pornography can become an addiction.

So then, you know, an addiction—we’re going to talk about what an addiction is, and then after I tell you what an addiction is, I’m going to teach you that you have two brains. You have a thinking brain and a feeling brain, and they work together, but it’s really important to keep your thinking brain in charge because it knows right from wrong and it learns about consequences. And then after I tell you about how that works, we’re going to talk about your attraction center and how that part of your brain is really targeted by pornography. It can become something that is always looking for something new and can become hijacked by pornography and this addictive process.

Then we will give you a plan so you know exactly what to do, not only when you see it, but when those memories keep popping back up because they can be very shocking. So we’re going to give you a plan so you don’t have to worry. You can just use this plan to keep yourself free from the harms of pornography because most likely someday you might see it. And I just want you to know what to do and that you can come and talk to me and that I want you to come and talk to me whenever this happens.

Mr. Jekielek:

I have to confess that I’ve seen some of this, and frankly it does keep replaying in my mind, and I kind of like it.

Ms. Jenson:

First of all, I’m really sorry that you’ve had to see it. And I can tell that it has already affected, you know, how you’re thinking. And when you say you kind of like it, let’s just, maybe we need to talk about that. I would love to hear why you like it. And, you know, then let’s have a conversation about what that is showing versus what is really healthy and is going to help you become a healthy adult who can have healthy relationships and maybe even someday have a really wonderful marriage. So let’s just talk about it openly. I’m happy to, you know, I want to know what you’re thinking about this.

Mr. Jekielek:

See, at this point, I think most parents are going to feel really uncomfortable talking to their kid. Well, let me tell you, or what I mean, or the kid—I don’t know, as a kid, is the kid really going to tell what they saw? Because you kind of, you know, just thinking back to a younger life, kind of knew this was forbidden stuff and you’re not really supposed to keep casually talking about it with your parents, even when they’re being very loving and so forth, right? Right? Like, I’m just, this is my—

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, did your parents talk to you about it, though?

Mr. Jekielek:

No, we didn’t talk about anything like that.

Ms. Jenson:

So you had a sense it was forbidden; you had a sense it wasn’t really appropriate for children, but you still, you know, you were so curious.

Mr. Jekielek:

However—well, I was particularly interested in those things that society was sort of telling you were taboo.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, some kids are that way; a lot of kids are not, but some kids are. And I would just say for the kids that are that way, I think it’s even more important to open this discussion with them because, you know, you can’t just say, well, my kids, you know, find it, and there’s going to—you need to give them your perspective, some education.

Mr. Jekielek:

I totally, I completely agree with that because it gives you, even as your, you know, interest, you also know the standard, or a standard, or something like that.

Ms. Jenson:

Well, and the harms that can come to you. And do you want—I mean, we have an article on defending my…

Mr. Jekielek:

Kids are not going to figure this out on their own, that’s for sure.

Ms. Jenson:

No.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s the point, right? So it might not solve the problem entirely, but it’s giving them a leg up. I mean, I’m thinking through what you’re saying here, because the temptation is to say, well, this is all fine and nice, but kids are like, they don’t care about their parents, they don’t know how to…

Ms. Jenson:

But parents can have a huge influence. And the younger you start, the better and the more influence you have, right? Because you’re setting the context. And, you know, I want to tell the story of a young man who decided, after his parents talked to him, that it wasn’t going to be fair to his future wife if he got involved in pornography because he would be looking at all these women and basically having sex with them in his mind. He didn’t feel like that was fair. I mean, it does sound like a pretty mature child, but he decided from the time he was in fifth or sixth grade that he wasn’t going to look at it.

Mr. Jekielek:

But that strikes me as a powerful thing to say, right, to young men who are maturing and so forth, because that’s obviously true.

Ms. Jenson:

Is this going to be fair?

Mr. Jekielek:

I think a lot of people would be like, maybe not.

Ms. Jenson:

Well, his friends showed him porn. This one was a terrible bestiality kind of thing that was going around all the sixth graders years ago. They were looking at it, and they said, you’ve got to do this. You’ve got to use porn. They had all these reasons why they thought they should be using porn, that somehow it had a healthy benefit. They were worried about him because he said, no, I’m good, and he really was good.

The day that I heard that he was getting married, I was so happy for him and for his wife—she was lucky. I think that children can be persuaded; they can be taught; they can be educated. Educators call this developing a disposition. So if you can develop a disposition in your child to see the problems with pornography, the harms, the many harms, the toxic sexual scripts, and to help guide them to wanting something better in their relationships—you know how you cannot have sexual intimacy if you’re using the script of porn. Porn is not about intimacy; you know intimacy—it’s just about conquest; it’s just about domination and violence. So if you want a happy marriage someday, you better stay away from porn because porn is going to take you in the opposite direction.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s probably something that features in the new book, the girls’ book, because I think girls are much more at an early age interested in things like marriage and finding the perfect guy and having a good relationship and that kind of stuff.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes. We talk about that in the chapter about these romance movies and novels and such, that we want something positive and for them to be able to have an intimate relationship with their spouse. And so there’s every good reason to begin these conversations with your son or daughter at an early age. And if we don’t, then we cannot get mad at them when they, if they stumble across it or, you know, begin to use it or use it even in an addictive fashion. We have to open up that conversation so that they can have some kind of protection, a defense against it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Are there, what are the legal realities around this? Is it like any kid can see anything, and that’s always perfectly fine from the legal perspective?

Ms. Jenson:

So there are a lot of laws that are not being enforced around pornography. There are so many obscenity laws still on the books, and nobody’s enforcing them. In many states, it is illegal to show pornography to a child. So there are laws, and there are laws against, you know, I mean, sexting—that’s child porn right there. Some kids are getting prosecuted for that, so that’s a worry. If your kid has a device that you’re paying for and they have images that are tantamount to child sexual abuse material, see Sam, guess who’s responsible? It’s the person paying for that phone. That’s the adult.

Mr. Jekielek:

So there are other motivations here to keep this stuff away. Yes. Because you can easily imagine how something like this could end up, if you’re watching pornography all the time, you wouldn’t even necessarily know.

Ms. Jenson:

Right. But I think that another really good reason to, you know, parents buy a lot of body safety books, right? They want children to be safe from predators. And I will say that children who know how to reject pornography and why are safer from an actual hands-on predator. A family with a six-year-old went to visit some friends for dinner, and the toys had been stored down in the basement just temporarily, so the kids would run down the stairs, grab a toy, and come back up. So this little six-year-old ran down the stairs; he was deliberating, you know, which toy he wanted, and a man came up with a smartphone and showed him gay porn and started grooming him.

Well, this little boy—his mom had read him Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. I don’t think she read it to him thinking this is going to save him from, you know, sexual abuse, but it did, because he ran up and told. His mom, and you know he had gotten out of a situation because pornography is the number one grooming tool of predators. I talked to a child advocacy center and it’s number one.

Mr. Jekielek:

So there’s actually, this has been somehow quantified that this is the number one grooming tool. What I meant earlier is that it strikes me as a powerful grooming tool, given everything we’ve discussed.

Ms. Jenson:

What else are they going to use? I mean, it’s perfect. You know, it normalizes children having sex. It breaks down barriers. Children having sex, it breaks down barriers. So yes, I would definitely say it’s the number one grooming tool. There is just nothing better. And so that’s what he was using. I spoke with a woman who had a case where there was a 12-year-old girl who had been sexually abused by her stepfather for years, since she was 10. When she was 10, he started showing her pornography and then kind of getting her to have sex with him.

Now, all he had to say to her was, if your mom finds out, we’re both in trouble. And that kept her silent. At some point though, the mom found out, right? I asked the caseworker if the mother had had this conversation, and not to blame her, but if the mother or someone had had this conversation with this 10-year-old and said, if anyone ever shows you pornography, you need to come and tell me.

Mr. Jekielek:

It would solve a whole lot of these issues.

Ms. Jenson:

It would absolutely save this girl from years of sexual abuse, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

Under the nose of the mother, right there. This is such an important point, actually. Because if we, let’s say that it’s right, it sounds right to me that pornography would be used as a grooming tool. Often the moment that people are alerting their parents or caregivers or whatever that this is happening, that could stop a whole chain of events.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes. But kids don’t, if they don’t have the vocabulary, if you haven’t opened the conversation, they’re very hesitant.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, everybody’s very hesitant to talk about this stuff. I mean, this is part of the reason why I think it’s not better known. It’s not. I mean, it’s hard. We’ll see what the reception to this episode is. I’m very, I’m very curious myself. But I really do believe that it’s such a serious issue in our society that we aren’t dealing with.

Ms. Jenson:

It’s an epidemic. It’s like a silent epidemic. Nobody wants to talk about it, but it’s hurting children. And you’re seeing it in the mental health numbers. You’re seeing, you know, all of that isn’t just screens and social media. A lot of it is pornography, and so you’re just seeing lives ruined. I mean, you may not, when you hear someone’s divorced, hear why. I have so many women coming up and telling me, I’m divorced because my husband was addicted to porn, and I just couldn’t handle it. After a while, he wouldn’t get help; it never worked. You know, I’m out of there because I feel so betrayed.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, never mind the people that are in the industry themselves, right? I mean, because there’s this whole—I mean, I remember there were all these narratives about how it’s all consensual and everyone’s happy and all this stuff. And it just is not like that. I’ve read enough; I know enough now that it’s been demonstrated that that’s absolutely not the case. It’s a lot of people acting out sexual trauma, abuse trauma, and things like that.

Ms. Jenson:

Yes, so it’s a widespread problem, but the good news is that there are tools out there now that help parents begin these protective conversations, train their children, and teach their children to avoid all of these harms, because they’re probably not going to be able to avoid seeing pornography, but they can avoid just dousing their brain with it.

Mr. Jekielek:

A final thought as we finish?

Ms. Jenson:

I guess one of the most loving things that you can do for your child is to help them, to give them a defense against not only pornography but all forms of sexual exploitation. It goes deep, and it doesn’t always get resolved. I was flying to DC once to a symposium on child-on-child problematic sexual behavior. The guy next to me was a pilot, and then he told me about his work and asked me about mine. He said when I told him what I was doing, he looked down and said, that happened to me. So he was abused by another child. He said, I’m still not over it.

So if we can get in there early when our children are first, you know, on the internet and prepare a defense so they know exactly what to do and they’re not alone. Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t do very well when I’m caught off guard, right? They’re not alone. We can help assure that they’re going to have a happy, healthy future and potential for a happy, healthy marriage.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Kristen Jenson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Ms. Jenson:

Thank you, Jan.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.