It was just an old laptop, tucked away in a Kansas closet—overlooked and forgotten. But when a 14-year-old boy powered it on in 2024, he found no barriers between himself and hundreds of explicit pornographic websites. In just two months, he accessed adult content over 100 times.
This is not just a family tragedy. This is a spiritual emergency.
His mother, identified only as “Jane Doe,” is now suing four major pornography platforms for failing to comply with Kansas’ strict age verification law. With help from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), she has filed lawsuits against more than one pornographic website. Each suit seeks at least $75,000 in damages, citing the “actual damages resulting from Q.R.’s access to material that is harmful to minors”—damages that include emotional pain, medical costs, and long-term developmental harm.
This mother’s legal fight is only the surface of a deeper cultural rot. As Catholics, we must see it for what it is: the porn industry is not just indifferent to the souls it destroys—it thrives on their ruin. It is a billion-dollar engine of sin, systematically undermining innocence, breaking families, and dulling consciences. And now, it is grooming our children.
Jane Doe, according to a press release from NCOSE, had been “vigilant in monitoring Q.R.’s devices to prevent his exposure to harmful material during this important developmental stage of his life.” But vigilance is no longer enough in a digital landscape where sin is only a click away, and pornographers operate without meaningful accountability.
Kansas’ 2023 law—one of the strictest in the nation—requires any website where a quarter or more of the content is pornographic to implement age verification systems. If they fail, they can face fines of $10,000 per violation, and parents can sue for at least $50,000 in damages. The law defines “harmful to minors” as content including acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, or physical contact with genitals or breasts. While critics argue the law could suppress LGBTQ content, others point to its clarity in protecting youth from hypersexualized material.
Benjamin Bull, general counsel for NCOSE, told Fox News, “Unless these online platforms actually install age verification, this [boy] … what’s happened to him and what’s happened to hundreds of thousands of others is just going to continue and get worse.”
And he’s right. What’s happening to our sons and daughters is not isolated. It is epidemic.
Pornography has always been a moral plague, but today it is packaged as entertainment, normalized by culture, and served directly into the hands of minors through smartphones, tablets, and unsecured laptops. Its addictive grip is no different from that of drugs—except this poison is sold as freedom.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is unequivocal: “Pornography offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act… It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants… It is a grave offense” (CCC 2354). And when it reaches children, the offense becomes an attack on their innocence, their development, and their very capacity to love purely.
As Catholics, we must stop treating this as a “men’s issue,” a “private sin,” or something that can be managed in silence. Pornography is a public scourge. It is the desecration of the human person and a direct assault on the family—the domestic church.
This Kansas mother’s cry for justice is also a cry for help, echoing what countless Catholic parents are feeling but may be too ashamed to say out loud: “I thought I was protecting him. I tried. But the evil still got in.”
Her courage should inspire us to demand that legislators do more, that tech companies face consequences, and that we reclaim our homes as sacred spaces. And more than that, we must catechize our children—not just about sin, but about dignity, chastity, and the joy of a heart made clean for God.
We are not powerless. We are the Church. It’s time we acted like it.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8)
Let us defend purity—for the sake of our children, our families, and our salvation.
