“I first watched porn when I was 15 years old,” writes University of Notre Dame senior Josh Haskell in the pages of the campus’s student newspaper, the Observer. Now, after battling through addiction, he’s telling his story and helping other young men find freedom from porn’s prison.
By some accounts, Haskell was lucky: The average age of exposure to pornography is 13 years old. Some researchers argue that the accurate average is even lower, coming in just under 10. Haskell was older than most. He knew porn felt wrong, but he also knew that everyone else was watching it. (RELATED: The Dark Side of AI: Generating Child Porn)
“As time passed, I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I wanted to stop. But I couldn’t,” he writes. “I didn’t know that a collared-shirt Catholic school kid could be so controlled by the things he saw on his cracked iPhone 6 screen.”
Fighting Addiction and Finding Freedom
Haskell began to fight against porn’s grasp on his life, striving to break the addiction through force of will. He found that the temptation was immense: “Your drug remains in your pocket all day, begging you to lean into just one moment of weakness.” After three years, he still couldn’t break free.
Then, one day, he joined a video support group that changed his life. “I was the only one in the meeting younger than 25,” he writes. Hearing the stories of 10 grown men who had struggled with porn for decades spurred Haskell into action. Porn addictions had wreaked havoc on their lives, hurting their wives, leading some of the men to infidelity, and causing decades of despair.
Haskell saw two paths forward: keep fighting and failing alone and end up like the broken men on the call, or seek the help he needed despite the embarrassment that seemed inevitable. “This time around, I didn’t want to seem strong. I wanted to be strong,” he writes. “History showed me that I wasn’t going to do that on my own. So, I got serious.”
He talked to a friend, sought accountability from his brother, and opened up to his parents. When he stopped trying to fight addiction alone, he was able to break the habit. Now, he’s working to give other young men the companionship and accountability that he needed to find freedom.
Bringing Light to Darkness
Though he might have felt alone in his early fight against addiction, Haskell knew he was far from being so. With over 91 percent of men and 60 percent of women reporting porn consumption, he knew that there had to be others who, like him, wanted to break their addictions.
Haskell and fellow student Nadim Khouzam decided to start an accountability group called “AsceND” for Notre Dame students fighting pornography addictions. He published a letter in the campus newspaper sharing his story and inviting students to join the groups he and Khouzam had formed.
“In my head before dropping this article, I was afraid that I would receive judgment. In reality, what has been far more prominent is respect and support,” Haskell told The American Spectator. “The truth is that my story is not unique at all — the vast majority of college kids have lived it themselves.”
Haskell and Khouzam have structured AsceND around small groups of five men — one leader and four participants. Within the group, each man has an accountability partner, and the leaders participate in accountability groups of their own with other leaders. In addition to group meetings and book studies, AsceND also provides opportunities to build community by attending Mass together, sharing meals, and volunteering at a nursing home.
The accountability groups met for the first time this past week, and Haskell told The American Spectator that the project has attracted 106 small group members and 25 student leaders.
“The craziest thing is that we have not even printed one flyer. Our advertising has primarily been through word of mouth,” Haskell told The American Spectator.
Students are clearly hungry for what Haskell and Khouzam have brought to campus. “The amount of strength we have behind the movement seems to be slowly tearing away at the negative stigma surrounding porn addiction,” Haskell said.
Khouzam told the Irish Rover, a student-run newspaper at Notre Dame, that “[w]hen something lingers in the dark for so long, it’s easy for our eyes to miss it. When we bring it out to the light, we can face it head-on and work together in accountability to fight against it.”
Inspired by AsceND, another campus organization will be hosting similar accountability groups for young women starting in late September in partnership with Magdala Ministries.
Battling Pornography at Notre Dame
Though the staff of Notre Dame’s campus ministry has supported AsceND with resources, meeting spaces, and advice, the initiative isn’t officially partnered with the university, Haskell said.
In the past, the university has been hesitant to touch the issue of pornography, declining to filter pornography from its Wi-Fi networks — as petitioned by over 1,000 students, faculty, and staff in 2018. Notre Dame’s “Responsible Use of Data & Information Technology Resources Policy” prohibits the viewing of pornographic materials through university Wi-Fi, but the policy is not enforced. According to a 2013 study, 63 percent of male students viewed porn through Notre Dame’s Wi-Fi.
In 2018, John Gohsman, the university’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said that a pornography filter “would be neither technologically difficult nor costly.” Cost is seldom an issue for Notre Dame, but the university did not act on the request from students, faculty, and staff. (RELATED: The Man Who Made Notre Dame)
“I would hope and expect that the standards are such at the University that the people within our Wi-Fi capabilities would be self-censors,” the university’s vice president for public affairs and communications said. “God’s given us the choice of whether we’re going to be sinners or not, you know?”
God has, indeed, given us freedom, but Haskell’s testimony is a reminder that freedom cannot be accomplished merely by sheer force of will. Overcoming a pornography addiction — just like any other addiction — requires community, companionship, and accountability.
Perhaps it’s a generational gap in understanding, as Notre Dame PhD student H.A. Hazony has argued, writing that older adults “fail to see that their students’ pornography habit is not [just] a sexual vice, but a disease.” Or maybe it’s an unwillingness to endure the inevitable, if ridiculous, allegations of “censorship” and endangered academic freedom. Perhaps it’s just the easy way out.
Filter or no filter, Haskell has taken a courageous first step in inviting his fellow students into greater freedom and deeper love. Sometimes the kids get it right before the adults do.
Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Northern Michigan in exile in Washington, D.C. You can follow her on Twitter @mfmyler.
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