Christians must recognize and make the case that the problem isn’t merely abusive or nonconsensual porn. It’s porn. Only a cultural transformation that goes deeper than mere consent—that offers a positive, God-honoring vision for sexuality and family—will be able to uproot this evil.

If a man exposed himself to children on a street corner, he would be arrested and charged with assault. However, when essentially the same thing happens online, there are no consequences. Instead, lawmakers and police assume that if children come across predatory pornography or strangers attempting to recruit them into porn, it’s a problem of parental supervision.

It’s well past time to stop treating the internet as a space where the rules don’t apply and to take seriously the sexual exploitation of minors that occurs online.

In fact, it’s even more urgent in light of the recent revelations about the world’s largest pornography website. Last month, Nicholas Kristof described in The New York Times internal memos from Pornhub. These memos were supposed to remain sealed but were released due to a filing error in an Alabama Federal District Court. In these memos, Pornhub employees admitted to knowing of and even joking about child sexual abuse on their website.

In one message from May of 2020, employees at Pornhub were aware of over 700,000 videos on their site that users had flagged for “depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems.” One employee wrote: “I hope I never get in trouble for having those vids on my computer [laugh out loud].” Another argued against banning a user who posted an underage video because “the user made money.” Yet another memo noted that videos apparently showing child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times. (The population of the United States, for reference, is 340 million.) These revelations shed more light on the website’s practices and how aware they were of the problem leading up to Kristof’s 2020 expose titled, “The Children of Pornhub.” That article documented the cesspool of child abuse and non-consensual material on so-called “adult” websites and how these companies remorselessly profited from it.

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