Sex Addiction Counseling | Marital Counseling | Christian Addiction Treatment

Have you ever had dandelions growing in your lawn? Ever since I was a child I remember watching in amazement how quickly they spread and soon covered our entire lawn. Each flower turns into the perfect distributing machine for its seemingly countless number of seeds. Believe it or not, pornography has spread across the World Wide Web at a rate that puts even the dandelions to shame. People seem to know commonly that pornography lurks profusely on the web, but many may not realize just how rampant it is.

According to TopTenREVIEWS Inc.¹, pornographic websites account for 12% of all sites on the web. It gets worse. Of all daily search engine requests, 25% are for pornographic material. That amounts to some 68 million searches per day. It is reported that over 42% of internet users view pornography. At any given second, over 28,000 internet users are viewing pornography, spending over $3,000 per second.

It is not just a problem for men anymore. Not even close. Women now account for 1 out of every 3 visitors to pornographic websites, totaling 9.4 million women every month. It is also reported that 17% of women struggle with pornography addictions.

What about the money? There must be money involved for there to account for 25% of all search traffic. Right? No question. For the portions of the world where it can be measured, revenues from pornography topped a whopping and ghastly $97,000,000,000 (yes that is $97 billion with a ‘b’). Where does the U.S. fit into all of this? Surprisingly, the U.S. is 4^th ($13.33 billion) in total revenues from pornography behind China ($27.4 billion), South Korea ($25.7 billion), and Japan ($19.98 billion). The U.S. is 7^th in per capita earnings from pornography. This does not indicate, however, the amount Americans are spending on pornography. It may just be that the while Americans spend a lot on pornography, the content is made elsewhere and therefore the money goes elsewhere. The U.S. does lead the world in number of pornographic web pages at over 244 billion, far exceeding Germany’s second place at 10 billion.

Another sad and startling set of statistics is regarding the exposure of children and youth to pornography. I hope you are sitting. This same report indicates that some 90% of children between the ages of 8 and 16 have viewed pornography online. The report indicates that most of this exposure has happened while they were doing homework. The average age at which children are first exposed to pornography online is 11. 89% of youth have witnessed sexual solicitation in chat rooms.

Like a devastating wall of muddy water, pornography is a terrible flood of filth that can destroy the lives of its users unless intervention is made. It is, unfortunately, far more pervasive than many would even care to know. A final sad statistic indicates that 10% of adults admit having an internet sexual addiction. If that many admit it, how many may actually be affected! If you are affected, get help. Hope and healing are possible. You can rise above addiction! You can live above it. Talk to professionals and religious leaders. Find local support meetings and groups. Start today. If you are not yet affected, protect your families and your children. Be aware of the poison that is lurking a click away.