Announcing the Pornfree Movement

Taken from Radio Interview (2 July 2020)

Every day on one website alone, more than 115 million people watch porn, more than the populations of Australia, Canada, Poland and the Netherlands combined. The hundred-billion-dollar industry has been booming during lockdown, doing severe harm to the mental health of its users, more and more of whom are children.

Talking to Neil Johnson on Vision’s 20Twenty, Ninnes said Real Talk is seeing alarming evidence that children are being exposed to pornography earlier than ever. Grade 4 and 5 teachers are now asking for advice about how to protect their students. 

Ninnes said when people learn about the damage porn consumption can do to the brain, they very quickly become allies to the cause. “Even if they’re not against porn as a concept, it’s very easy to win people over with the argument that kids deserve to be free of this, and deserve the opportunity to grow up without the influence of porn, because it’s devastating to their makeup and devastating to their futures.”

People have been accessing this content 30 percent more often during the pandemic.

“Basically with COVID-19, pornographers were sent into a spin,” Ninnes said. “They had an opportunity to take advantage of peoples’ downtime. And we know through the research on this, and the data that’s released, that when people have downtime, is when they gravitate towards pornography.”

In the rush to take advantage of this moment, many websites have been changing the way they operate. “They offered premium services for free. And this is particularly dangerous, because one of the safeguards for minors is that sometimes they need credit cards to access some of the more graphic material, or full-on material.”

“When people are isolated, they don’t need pornography. They need connection. And when people are vulnerable, they don’t need pornography. They need protection. And when people are lonely, they should be called forth out of themselves into real relationships. And so I think this idea that porn is the antidote to someone’s loneliness, to someone’s isolation, needs to be really challenged in the public sphere.”

Ninnes says depression, anxiety, and uncertainty make people more likely to adopt unhealthy habits. And right now, there are plenty of all of those to go around. “Porn doesn’t discriminate,” he said. “This is not about dirty old men in dodgy suburbs. This is about children. This is about women. This is about Christians. We’re all vulnerable.” And because of the way it changes our brains, pornography is as powerful and addictive as a drug. “The internet has made this particular drug really accessible, and pseudo-anonymous, so people think they’re doing it in isolation, and no one will know.”

“You don’t have to go to the bottle shop to buy your carton of beer, or to the drug dealer on the corner. You can pull out your phone, and access something that allows you to numb out.”

“So I encourage listeners to have a real heart of sympathy and understanding for those who go down this path, because it’s not easy, and it’s quite often not their fault. It’s out of a place of emptiness, and woundedness, and often a history that goes back to their childhood.”

Check out the campaign’s website and social media at PornFreeMovement.com for more great info and resources about the way porn harms our relationships and mental and physical health, and why it’s especially dangerous to children.