A 12-year-old boy was playing Fortnite when the popular game connected him with a complete stranger. The stranger messaged him, offering to send him highly sought after “V-Bucks,” the in-game currency. But this was no gesture of goodwill—the stranger followed up by sending the child pornographic videos, unprompted. The 12-year-old opened them and, over time, requested more. The stranger took his opportunity to tighten control, directing the child to send nude pictures of himself in exchange for more V-Bucks.
A Forensic Evaluation Clinician, Julia, shared this frightening case as an example of how perpetrators are accessing and exploiting children. Perpetrators can find children online, then groom and exploit them through exposure to pornography and requests for explicit images.
This is just one of the many ways pornography and child sexual abuse (CSA) are linked. During National Child Abuse Prevention Month, we must call for those research-backed connections to be taken seriously.
Is Pornography Connected to Child Sexual Abuse?
Adding to an already substantial body of research, a recent study examined the links between pornography and CSA, using data from interviews and focus groups with 50 professionals working with CSA survivors. Given research suggesting that half of children have seen pornography by age 13, understanding how such material is connected to sexual abuse becomes vital. The authors found four primary ways in which pornography and CSA are intertwined:
1. Social Modeling: Learning by Watching
Children who see pornography may imitate what they see. Exposure to pornography provides a pathway to learn about abusive behaviors, leading children to act out sexually. As one therapist noted, “They’re trying to process [what they’ve seen].”
Julia described another case she encountered where a child was on YouTube and came across cartoon pornography. The child copied what she saw. Julia explained, “She said she liked how it felt, so she just kept going with it and then got her siblings involved. And then it kind of went from there.”
As participants in the study noted, sexualized behavior from children doesn’t occur in a vacuum—it’s been taught. In the past, that usually meant children had been sexually abused, but now we have to keep in mind that they might have simply seen it on a screen.
Research Summary: Child-on-Child Harmful Sexual Behavior
2. Normalization: Redefining What’s “Acceptable”
Pornography can make harmful and even abusive sexual behaviors seem normal, such as sexual violence, child sexual abuse, or incest. To a child, who often doesn’t fully understand sex, boundaries, or consent, this normalization can shape what they see as acceptable behavior.
Brenda, an Adolescent Treatment Therapist, shared the story of a young client who developed highly unrealistic and harmful beliefs about sex as a result of the pornography he watched. He shared how, in one pornography video, a stepbrother set up a spycam in his stepsister’s room to spy on her. When the stepsister found it and angrily confronted her stepbrother, the two ended up having sex. So, Brenda’s client set a spycam up in his own stepsister’s room for her to find, thinking that “it was going to play out like it did in a pornography video.” What was pornography teaching him to believe about appropriate sexual partners and acceptable ways to initiate a sexual encounter?
Other professionals explained how violent pornography is affecting kids. Carly, a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) recalled helping a girl who was strangled by a boy her age. The girl told her “I think he was just trying to be sexy.” Carly posed the question to researchers, “Who set the sexual context that being strangled is sexy?” Well, pornography.
Frontline workers note that pornography’s depiction of violence against women and lack of consent is a particular detriment. One professional described girls’ reports: boys they were sexually engaging with were upset because “‘I didn’t seem to be like what he saw on porn.’” Another professional lamented whether campus rape would be less of a problem if boys would “not receive their education from pornography for years.”
When pornography features assault, rape, and incest, what sexual script is it teaching children? What about depictions of child-like or animated Disney characters, or racial stereotypes? Professionals have found that pornography normalizes dangerous acts and attitudes, for some children at a very early age.
3. Grooming: Preparing Children for Abuse
Abusers may show children pornography to introduce sexual behavior, desensitize them, and prepare them for abuse. One District Attorney explained how clients reported that their exploiters “made them watch porn and . . . forced them to act out those movies or the scenes with the offender.” Other professionals shared similar cases—with children as young as four—of perpetrators watching pornography around their victims or coercing them to copy what they saw.
Perpetrators are not always adults—increasingly, adolescents seem to be using pornography to instigate harmful sexual behavior with younger children. One Child Advocacy Center (CAC) employee explained how that might play out: “[It’s] not so much in the context of, ‘This is what I want you to do,’ but sort of more in the context of, ‘Haha, isn’t this funny . . .’, [to] sort of desensitize and normalize it, and breaking down inhibitions and barriers.”
While these children are initiators of seriously harmful behavior, they are victims as well—victims of pornography and often, as one forensic interviewer noted, of previous child abuse themselves. To make matters worse, faulty systems make it very difficult for these children to get help and healing. A CAC Director lamented, “We have to charge that child in DJJ [the Department of Juvenile Justice] in order to get treatment, which is so [messed] up.” And a therapist explained that in the justice system, “instead of remembering that they are a kid . . . we’re putting a label [like ‘perpetrator’ or ‘sex offender’] on.” Participants emphasized that criminalizing and labeling children hinders meaningful support and intervention.
4. Power and Threat: Control through Fear
Pornography can be used to control or silence a child. Perpetrators may threaten to expose the child’s pornography consumption to parents or to share explicit images of the child—often ones they have manipulated the child to create—to maintain power. This form of exploitation, which is called sextortion, traps victims in cycles of fear and compliance.
Frontline professionals report that this dynamic is increasingly common, even in teen relationships. Abuse can take the form of “coercive control,” Forensic Nurse Examiner Denise shared: bullying, stalking, and threats to post sexual images online—rather than physical violence.
Patterns of Exposure, Escalation, and Abuse
These patterns of imitation, normalization, grooming, and control highlighted in this new study line up with previous research showing that pornography and CSA can often be overlapping and mutually reinforcing.
For example, a longitudinal study following 10-15 year-olds over a period of three years found that exposure to violent pornography predicted a nearly six-fold increase in self-reported sexually aggressive behavior later on. Another analysis found that, among children who engaged in harmful sexual behavior with other children, a majority had been exposed to pornography. Other studies have found that early exposure or exposure in general among adolescents is associated with sexually offending later in life.
Some research suggests that sex offenders who consume CSAM often begin with less extreme pornography and become desensitized over time, with interests escalating toward more violent or exploitative content—including younger victims. This is, of course, a major problem when it leads to CSAM, but is also problematic in terms of the behaviors that it teaches. Video titles and content glorifying child abuse normalize it and inspire plans of action to abuse among viewers.
In other words, pornography is not just shaping what children think is acceptable—it can also shape what perpetrators come to see as normal or even desirable. When viewers of any age are repeatedly exposed to sexual content depicting children, coercion, or violence, those scripts can be internalized and imitated.
What Puts Children at Risk?
Abuse and pornography intersect in many ways, but, according to the study, some conditions make children more vulnerable in the first place.
Importantly, technology is often designed in way that leaves children unprotected. Children now carry constant Internet access in their pockets, and perpetrators exploit that reality. Professionals described how contact often begins on social media or in multiplayer games. Perpetrators might pretend to also be a child or ask for naked photos, escalating the interaction into grooming, coercion, and abuse. Many parents feel outpaced by technology and struggle to keep their children safe in the online world.
Gaps in resources and systems can make intervention harder. Participants pointed to lack of training, families’ limited access to services, and even justice system practices. For example, one Pediatric Nurse Practitioner explained how certain labels that providers give children can inhibit healing, pointing out, “you can’t really be promiscuous at the age of 7- and 9-years old.” Other professionals highlighted the need for those in relevant fields to consistently screen for pornography exposure and self-made explicit media.
Cultural silence and social narratives also play a role. For example, when conversations about sex, pornography, and online behavior are avoided, children are left to learn on their own. And as one therapist noted, when kids turn to Google with questions about sex, they don’t find guidance—they find pornography. Other narratives, professionals note, stem from pornography and create false ideas about what healthy relationships look like; they support gender inequality, sexualized violence, and attitudes of entitlement.
Together, these factors can create an environment where exposure is common and exploitation is cultivated.
Interrupting the Patterns
The patterns identified in this study are not inevitable, but they are predictable. And that gives us a window to intervene.
Authors concluded that reducing harm requires action at multiple levels: stronger safeguards on platforms; better education for children, parents, and professionals; and policies that recognize how easily minors can access harmful content online.
One critical step is ensuring that pornography websites are required to verify age and prevent children from accessing explicit material in the first place. Without meaningful barriers, exposure will remain the default, not the exception.
What Can You Do?
Urge lawmakers to pass age verification legislation that would require pornography companies to prevent children from accessing their sites.
And if you’re looking for practical ways to protect your family, sign up for our Parent Center newsletter for tools, guidance, and updates on raising kids in the digital age.
