Part 1 Title: Researcher says children are encountering pornography earlier than many adults realize
Story Intro:
A leading researcher warns that children are being exposed to online pornography at younger ages and at higher rates than many adults realize. Gail Dines is a retired Wheelock College professor and author of the New York Times bestseller Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. She founded the nonprofit Culture Reframed and works with parents, educators and policymakers around the world. Dines says children are being targeted in every community, including Mississippi, and many adults do not fully understand the scope of the problem. Some of what you will read in this story and hear in the interview may be disturbing.
Frazier When I first talked with you, I asked you, how can we protect our children from bad actors on the internet? And you responded, this issue is far beyond any parent's capability. Why?
Dines You can’t expect to solve a public health crisis. It takes many people to come to the table, but especially legislators who should see this as a child protection issue. I think the key issue was the introduction of ex-hamster Pornhub, PornHub being the largest one, and now kids can just get into porn.
If you would have told me, I don't know, 25, 30 years ago, that we would have this thing called the internet and the pornographers would take it over, as they have, because a third of all searches are for pornography, I wouldn't have believed you. I would have said, no, no one's going to allow this. And you know what? I would've been wrong.
Frazier Has it always been the point, since Internet became accessible, to lure children in? Or at what point were children becoming the target?
Dines Well, very early on. The average age of pornography, whether you look for it or it comes at you, the first time seeing it, especially for boys, is around 10 to 12. But there's reports of younger. Why you want young kids is because their brain is developing during adolescence at a vast level, that new neurons are being made. Their dopamine receptors are on high alert. So the younger you get these kids, the more likely you are for them to be addicts in the future.
The internet sites that we wouldn't consider pornography, like Snapchat, et cetera, Instagram, TikTok, basically you can go from those sites to Pornhub within five, 10 seconds. So, they're getting it blasted at them from everywhere.
Frazier What particulars are there that you know about Mississippi?
Dines It’s everywhere and one of the reasons is that we don't have good sex education in schools. These kids are not being protected by the adults that should be protecting them. There should be very robust sex education which especially talks about how to be safe around predators. Kids are not aware of what's going on, in many cases and neither are parents. So there needs to be a mass education campaign. The schools are one of the best places to start, of course.
A lot of adults who should be protecting kids, and I'm not including parents here because it's too much for them, teachers, pediatricians, nurses, people whose job it is, to take care of kids. They're not aware of the problem and if they are, they're not doing enough.
Frazier Well, when we talked before this interview, I tell you, some of the stuff you shared blew my mind. You started culture reframing you said about 10 years ago.
Dines Yes. I was a professor for 30 odd years and I studied pornography. I went around the world actually, still doing, you know, lecturing, advising governments in Brazil, Poland, Sweden, Norway, the UK. And what I was seeing and hearing and what the studies were showing, because there's a lot of social science, medical, academic studies on this, is just how much worse it is, than when I started because no one else was doing this.
Still to today, we go to conferences where we speak, and there can be, for example, a huge conference on sexual abuse of children, and we will be, Culture Reframed, the only organization speaking about the role of pornography.
When I go into a hospital to speak to pediatricians, or when I was at the CDC, they were shocked, absolutely shocked, and they shouldn't be. The truth is, they shouldn't be. That is, again, a dereliction of duty, because this is part of your work. And to talk about child sexual abuse today, in 2026, without pornography, is missing the big picture. Same too with the way that pornography has hijacked social media.
Frazier You talked about some of the effects of when children are sexualized. One that you mentioned was quite disturbing and that is young boys raping little girls, younger girls and younger boys.
Dines That increasingly what you're seeing is the record about 50% of sexual abuse of children is peer-on-peer, usually boy on girl or boy. The ages of the rapists have gone down to 11 to 15, and the age of the victims are often usually girls between four and seven.
The other thing that's happening when we work with the child advocacy centers is that they're finding that the acts that the kids' abuse are much more cruel. They're straight from pornography, they're seeing things they've never seen before, and also what they're finding is that the kids who are doing the raping, are actually filming it and uploading it onto YouTube and sort of sites on Pornhub. Think about this, they're recording an illegal act.
Part 2 Title: How early exposure shows up in behavior and what adults should watch for
Story intro:
In part two of our conversation, pornography researcher Gail Dines warns that the effects of online content on children and teens are already showing up in troubling ways. Dines has spent years studying widespread access to pornography and calls it a global public health crisis. She says the impact can shape behavior, relationships and development. In this segment, she explains the warning signs and what adults need to watch for now.
Dines Studies have showed that porn addicts release more dopamine when they see porn than heroin addicts and cocaine addicts. They become addicted more quickly. Snapchat, etc., Instagram, TikTok. You can go from those sites to Pornhub within 5-10 seconds. This doesn't stop when you're 18.
Studies show the effects of pornography, which include behavioral, emotional, sexual, the lot. These students have been using pornography for years. So, what the kids are dying for is someone to come in and explain their world to them because really we've left them alone to navigate this completely pornified world and the consequences are just devastating to young children. I'm not talking about a small number; and a lot of parents say, “you know my kid wouldn't do this.” Well the question is not if your kid sees porn it's when.
Frazier Can they marry and have manageable, functioning relationships and marriages?
Dines We've got to make a line here between those who are excessive users and those who move away from it, but increasingly children are becoming habitual excessive users. They would rather watch pornography than date.
When you start dating at a certain age. It gives you skills on how to develop relationships, on how to talk to someone that you're romantically involved with. Then as you go along, you know, the sort of life span of adolescence, you learn more about relationships, etc. So, they don't have the skills or the knowledge of who they are as a human being any more at 30 than they did at 13.
They're taking their porn into their marriages, their relationships. The first generation that this was experimented upon are now ready to become parents. From a lawyer's association said that 50% of divorces today involve the man using pornography. It's actually in the relationships now. The more parents or many fathers use pornography, the more likely a kid is too.
Frazier What are the warning signs that a child might be looking at porn on a social media platform?
Dines First of all, increased secrecy. You walk in and suddenly your kid closes their device. You need to know who your kid is conversing with on the internet as you know your kid's offline friend. The kid must not have their own password. That's another red flag if they change the password on you. Also, if you're seeing emotional changes, a withdrawal from their friends, from their school activities, from their sports, also, academic decline. Pornography actually lowers, decreases the gray matter in your brain.
Spending more time in the room than usual or taking a selfie in the bathroom. Phones should never be in the bathroom and at night, decide a time for the family where all devices are put into a charging station. The parents should model that. So say by nine o'clock, finished, no internet.
One of the things pediatricians have told me, if they're not sleeping well or if they are tired, then this is a sign that they're also on pornography. Signs of premature sexual activity as well. This is why you need professionals because kids often talk through emojis, which you can't understand. What looks like a pretty innocent emoji of a clock or tears or you put them in a certain order and it means are you up for sex tonight?
Frazier How do you help folks? What can you teach us to be able to help our children?
Dines Well, we have online courses at Cultural Framed. They're all free, they're all built by experts in the field and we have one for parents on how to talk to kids about pornography. What we even do is mock conversations because believe me your kid would rather be anywhere in the world than talking to you about pornography. We script out conversations and we assume a lot of them won't go well, so there's another conversation as a way to bring it back where you started.
We say you should have not a 100 minute conversation about pornography and hypersexuality in the culture, but you should have 101 one minute conversations. Kids don't want to be lectured to, but before you do this, you have to educate yourself. There's a parent's program, which you can go in for five minutes, five hours, five days. There's a program for educators, which is a sex-ed program to teach in high school and we also have materials for medical professionals as well dealing with this.
Pornography is never mentioned and one of the things we've been working with different communities and medical organizations is to get a question in there about social media and pornography and it is very difficult how you bring this up. Everyone has to educate themselves before they start talking about pornography with the kids. You're going to be uncomfortable, not just as a parent, but we know many pediatricians are uncomfortable bringing this up. So, you better make sure you don't transmit this to the kid, and you also need to make sure you know what you're talking about.