624,000+ child porn traders have been found online in the U.S.
It’s no secret that porn has become mainstream entertainment in our society.
From popular porn sites putting up billboards in New York City’s Times Square to sites like BuzzFeed normalizing porn with viral videos, it feels like porn is taking over. Porn is plastered all over social media sites like Tumblr (though not anymore as of December 2018) and Instagram, and it’s too easy to see on Twitter considering the Twitterverse is home to an estimated 10+ million porn accounts.
But not everyone is complaining about porn’s pervasiveness. Check out these real tweets we found:
We wonder what these people would think once they understood the facts behind the real harmful effects of porn.
The reality is that porn’s harmful effects are no longer a mystery, and new issues are being discovered on the regular. The science and research has been out for years now and thousands of people, including porn performers themselves, have spoken out on how porn has seriously damaged their lives and relationships.
So let’s shed some more light on this issue, shall we? Here are some quick stats and facts about porn’s presence and influence in our society:
Consumer stats from NCOSE that are hard to believe:
1. 64% of young people, ages 13–24, actively seek out pornography weekly or more often. [1]
2. Teenage girls are significantly more likely to actively seek out porn than women 25 years old and above. [2]
3. A study of 14- to 19-year-olds found that females who consumed pornographic videos were at a significantly greater likelihood of being victims of sexual harassment or sexual assault. [3]
4. A Swedish study of 18-year-old males found that frequent consumers of pornography were significantly more likely to have sold and bought sex than other boys of the same age. [4]
5. A 2015 meta-analysis of 22 studies from seven countries found that internationally the consumption of pornography was significantly associated with increases in verbal and physical aggression, among males and females alike. [5]
6. A recent UK survey found that 44% of males aged 11–16 who consumed pornography reported that online pornography gave them ideas about the type of sex they wanted to try. [6]
7. Porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, & Twitter combined each month. (HuffPost)
8. 35% of all internet downloads are porn-related. (WebRoot)
9. 34% of internet users have been exposed to unwanted porn via ads, pop-ups, etc. (WebRoot)
10. The “teen” porn category has topped porn site searches for the last six years (Pornhub Analytics).
11. At least 30% of all data transferred across the internet is porn-related. (HuffPost)
12. The most common female role stated in porn titles is that of women in their 20’s portraying teenagers. (Jon Millward.) (In 2013, Millward conducted the largest personal research study on the Porn Industry in the U.S. He interviewed 10,000 porn performers about various aspects of the business.)
13. Recorded child sexual exploitation (known as “child porn”) is one of the fastest-growing online businesses. (IWF)
14. 624,000+ child porn traders have been discovered online in the U.S. [7]
15. Between 2005 and 2009, child porn was hosted on servers located in all 50 states. (Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection)
16. Porn is a global, estimated $97 billion industry, with about $12 billion of that coming from the U.S. (NBC News)
17. In 2018 alone, more than 5,517,000,000 hours of porn were consumed on the world’s largest porn site. (Ponhub Analytics)
18. Eleven pornography sites are among the world’s top 300 most popular Internet sites. The most popular such site, at number 18, outranks the likes of eBay, MSN, and Netflix. (SimilarWeb)
19. “Lesbian” was the most-searched-for porn term on the world’s largest free porn site in 2018. (Pornhub Analytics)
20. The world’s largest free porn site also received over 33,500,000,000 site visits during 2018 alone. (Pornhub Analytics)
What do these numbers mean?
These issues aren’t going to change as long as society continues to deny the real, proven harms of porn and a vast majority of people believe the lie that it’s harmless. At one point in time, porn wasn’t a common issue that affected millions of people, much less all of society. It wasn’t a topic that needed to be discussed with such urgency. But, just by looking at these stats, it seems like those days are over.
Porn is a favorite past time for millions of consumers, and many of them have no idea what kind of harm they’re letting into their own lives, or the kind of exploitation they’re contributing to.
But we can change that. We can raise awareness, and the good news is, each of us holds the power to change these numbers by being educated and decreasing the demand for sexual exploitation through awareness. Right now, the porn industry is simply supplying what people are demanding. The only way this changes is if people stop, re-examine reality, get educated about the real harmful effects of porn, and make a change in their lives to exclude porn.
Why this matters
By stopping the demand for porn, we are putting an end to something that harms consumers, destroys relationships, and affects our society as a whole. It’s time to change the stats. Stopping the demand starts here, with us spreading the facts.