When Seven-Year-Olds Are Addicted to Porn, Society Has Already Failed

This is not a marginal issue. It is a civilisational one.

Pornography is often framed as a private vice or an unfortunate side-effect of the internet age. In reality, it is a multi-billion-pound industry that actively shapes culture, rewires expectations, and deforms how human beings see one another. Its effects do not stop at children, nor do they remain behind closed doors.

A society saturated in pornography cannot claim to respect women. When intimacy is industrialised, women are reduced to consumable images and men are trained to see bodies rather than persons. Desire is stripped of responsibility, and human beings are re-imagined as commodities designed to satisfy impulse. This cultural logic does not remain on screens; it spills into relationships, workplaces, and public life.

Children raised in such an environment are not merely “exposed” — they are conditioned. Long before emotional maturity, they encounter distorted ideas of intimacy, consent, and self-worth. The result is confusion, shame, compulsive behaviour, and in many cases deep isolation. As the charity behind the Sky News report put it, children are being left to “navigate adult content without adult tools,” a burden no child should carry.

To be clear, parents are trying. Many are limiting screen time, banning smartphones in schools, installing filters, and having difficult conversations earlier than they ever imagined they would need to. These efforts are sincere and necessary — but they are not sufficient.

The elephant in the room remains untouched: the pornography industry itself.

Liberal societies speak endlessly about safeguarding children while refusing to confront an industry that profits directly from their harm. We are told that regulation is impossible, that bans are naïve, that “freedom” demands tolerance of exploitation. But this raises an unavoidable question:

What kind of freedom requires broken children as collateral damage?

Would liberal societies rather protect an industry dominated by men, fuelled by exploitation, and insulated by profit, or protect children from psychological harm? The Sky News report makes clear that the cost of inaction is already being paid, not in theory but in therapy rooms, classrooms, and homes.

There is an uncomfortable contrast here that many would rather ignore.

The Muslim community, so often caricatured as backward, oppressive, or out of step with modernity, has long upheld a social ethic that resists the sexual commodification of women. Modesty, boundaries, and moral restraint are not about repression; they are about preserving human dignity. In such a framework, women are not public property, intimacy is not entertainment, and children are shielded rather than exposed.

This is not to claim moral perfection. Pornography addiction is not exclusively a “liberal problem.” Muslims who drift from their values and principles can — and do — fall prey to the same industry, spending endless hours in cycles of shame and despair. But the difference is this: the Islamic system recognises pornography as a harm, not a right. It names the problem rather than normalising it.

Liberal societies, by contrast, often lack the moral language to criticise pornography without contradicting themselves. They mourn the consequences while defending the cause.

When seven-year-olds are spoken of as being addicted to pornography, the question of “personal choice” collapses entirely. A society that permits pornography to exist, defends itself as progressive, and then acts surprised by broken children is not morally confused — it is morally complicit. As long as this industry is protected, liberal societies forfeit any claim to be role models for the world or champions of women’s dignity. You cannot preach empowerment while sustaining an economy that feeds on exploitation and leaves children psychologically fractured in its wake.

History will not remember liberal societies for how advanced they were, but for how confidently they normalised the commodification and breaking of human beings — and called it freedom.