Pornography and Sexual Addiction in Teenagers - Essay Example

In choosing this topic, I observed through my own experience in working for various agencies that many teens are obsessed with sex. I find that many teens also have more than one addiction in addition to sexual addiction: they may be smoking, drinking, or using drugs. Currently, there are 22.6 million teens who are dealing with some form of addiction and about 35 million families who have children who are at risk for some form of addiction (Christian Broadcasting Network, 2008). This means that teenagers are in trouble and that something must be done to help them.

This problem is important for me as a researcher because I understand that there needs to be a social change in order to help teenagers. If this was a problem 30 or so years ago, it did not seem to be as prevalent as it is today. This does not mean that it was not there, it just means that people were not as focused on it as they are today. I also am interested in this topic because so many children are in trouble with the law because their behavior has made them act out in sexual ways that have included rape and violence against women and others.

Unfortunately, there is not a sure way to understand when a teen is addicted to porn and there are only a few empirical students that talk about what pornography addiction does to a child; most are about sexual addiction. For this research, I had to concentrate on sexual addiction and bring in the aspects of pornography addiction as I found them.Problem StatementBy the time that children reach adolescence, thinking about sex is very normal. Many children are already experimenting with sex with their peers and many are getting “the talk” from their parents about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate at their age.

Sex also has a dynamic impact on our society because it is always present: Most advertising in any media has some element of sex in it whether blatantly shown or subliminally shown. By the time children reach puberty, they have been inundated with sex talk by their friends and they may have even seen a few pornographic pictures that their friends showed them. In the old days, before the Internet, the most sexually explicit photos that children saw were in the National Geographic Magazine.Pictures of tribes of people who wore no clothes were seen as exciting because they were naked.

However, today, with the ability of the Internet to capture anything, anywhere, and anytime, children are exposed to way more than naked people; they are exposed to some of the most disturbing pornography imaginable. We cannot only blame the Internet because cable TV has also given children access to hardcore pornography (porn). Children are able to find porn sites using only a few mouse clicks, and if parents have not locked porn sites on cable or satellite services, children can have access to porn 24 hours a day.

The effect of porn on children is a gap in the literature for many reasons. Children and teens are often brought up in homes were talking about sex is taboo which makes them reluctant to talk about their sexual thoughts or their habits.