Harris, 32, has found freedom from pornography and now helps others battling it. She says she sometimes tells pastors: “You’re fighting for your men, and that’s great. But you’re being flanked.” Women are languishing too.

Jessica Harris was 13 years old when her online research for a school project returned a handful of harmless science videos and one website that changed the course of her life: a link to hardcore pornography.

Harris was shocked, but curious.

“It was like watching a train wreck,” she says. “You know it’s bad, but you can’t look away.” The next time she went online, Harris knew how to find the site again, even though what she had seen was vile. “It was a war of emotions,” she says.

Harris lost the war.

For the next few years, Harris tucked into hardcore pornography nearly every day, often for hours at a time. She says it became an escape, a way of coping with life, and that it made her feel wanted.

The high-school student with a 4.0 grade-point average kept up her bookwork—and stayed involved in her local church—despite losing sleep and becoming obsessed with her next opportunity to go online.

“I was making sure that I was the model student and the model Christian girl and the model daughter—whatever I needed to be to keep people from guessing something was wrong.”

Harris longed to stop. She says she’d wake up in the morning and think, “Not today.” But her resolve was short-lived. “My feet walked to it,” she says. “It was like the air I breathed. I had to have it.”

Harris wasn’t alone.

Not all pornography users feel conflicted about their habits, but the numbers of men and women accessing porn online are staggering: In 2016, the largest pornography website in the world reported that users streamed some 4.6 billion hours of porn from its website alone.

Estimates indicate pornography is a nearly $100 billion global industry. An estimated $10 billion to $12 billion comes from the United States.

Statistics vary widely, but a 2016 study by the Barna Group found 51 percent of males ages 13 and over use porn at least once a month. Seventy percent of youth pastors said at least one teen had sought their help because of porn use in the last 12 months. Twenty-one percent of youth pastors admitted they currently struggle with pornography themselves.

But porn use isn’t just a man’s problem, and it’s especially insidious among young women: The Barna study found 33 percent of women ages 13 to 24 seek out porn at least once a month.

That’s a crucial demographic churches sometimes miss. Harris notes that while pastors and church leaders have become more comfortable addressing the problem of pornography among men, they often fail to realize or mention that women struggle as well.

It’s a dynamic that can leave many women feeling isolated and unable to ask for help.

The internet makes pornography available on the small devices most U.S. adults and young people carry in their pockets.

Harris, 32, has found freedom from pornography and now helps others battling it. She says she sometimes tells pastors: “You’re fighting for your men, and that’s great. But you’re being flanked.” Women are languishing too.

As porn users languish, a few slivers of light seep through the cracks of an otherwise dark pit. Some secular groups are starting to acknowledge the destruction pornography wreaks on individuals and families, and four states have declared pornography use a public health crisis.

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