Self-help, information and support for those concerned about their inappropriate thoughts or behaviour.
Information and support for those concerned about the behaviour of another adult or those concerned about a child or young persons behaviour or wellbeing.
We offer professionals practical advice, training resources, and support tools to help them recognise, prevent, and respond to child safety concerns effectively.
We can support anyone with a concern about child sexual abuse and its prevention via our self-help resources, programmes and helpline.
As a charity, we rely on the kindness and generosity of people like you to support our vital work to prevent child sexual abuse. And right now, we need your help more than ever.
By donating, fundraising, or simply spreading the word about our work, your support will have a huge impact.
Self help modules:
This self-help section will help you explore and understand your use of legal pornography and whether your use of adult pornography is a problem.
This self-help section will help you explore and understand:
If you are viewing legal adult pornography then this is your choice and we are not here to shame you for using it or to tell you to stop.
But this self-help section will encourage you to think about whether viewing legal adult pornography is helpful or harmful for you.
Some people we work with connect viewing legal adult pornography to their illegal online sexual behaviour. Some of the reasons for this may become evident as you work through this module, particularly when you look at the section on drivers.
Pornography is sexual content designed to sexually excite people. It can be pictures, videos, written stories, or other forms. It often shows sexual body parts, people having sex, foreplay, or masturbation.
Legal pornography can show one or more adults (aged 18 or older) having sex or engaging in other sexual behaviours. The adults must consent to these sexual behaviours, to being filmed or photographed, and to the videos or pictures being distributed.
Bondage and fetishes can be shown as long as they are consensual and do not lead to abusive behaviours, for example, a person being physically harmed, their life threatened, or rape scenarios.
In the UK, if you are aged 18 or over you can legally view adult pornographic material.
If you are an adult viewing adult pornography then this is your choice and we are not here to shame you for using it or to tell you to stop.
But this self-help section will encourage you to think about whether using adult pornography is helpful or harmful for you.
Before the internet, people might have gone to a shop or a cinema to pay for adult pornography. But now it is easily and freely available online. This reduces any social embarrassment, inhibition, or shame that may have been felt when buying adult pornography face-to-face.
As a result, the amount of people viewing adult pornography and the amount of pornography they view has grown. Some people view hours of adult pornography before they notice how much time has passed.
Lots of men who we work with talk about pornography being good or bad and think that viewing mainstream pornography is OK because it is legal. But they also talk about feelings of shame after viewing it.
Adult pornography can be harmful to some of the people shown in it. Some adult pornography actors (porn stars) will have thought about their decision to be involved and given consent, performing in an environment they feel safe and looked after.
But others might have thought there was no other option, been unwilling, forced, threatened, or even been through sex trafficking. With amateur footage, you might be viewing people who give consent to show themselves sexually online, but you could also be watching something that wasn’t supposed to be shared, such as revenge porn. It is impossible to guarantee the people you are watching have given consent.
How can you tell if your use of adult pornography is a problem? Use the quiz below to find out.
This module may not be that useful for you.
This module may be useful for you
The more questions you agree with, the more problematic your pornography use appears to be. If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions, you might find this module helpful.
This will be different for different people.
Some triggers are emotions themselves, for example, feeling bored, or living with a constant feeling of stress or anxiety.
Some triggers are caused by something that happens, for example, having a bad day at work or an argument with a partner.
Some triggers come from situations, for example, sitting in the room where you’d usually look at adult pornography.
Some triggers come from habits, for example, viewing adult pornography at the same time of day.
Negative feelings can trigger some people to go online and view sexual content to make themselves feel better or help them cope. They try to replace the negative feelings with more positive feelings of excitement, arousal, and adventure.
This might feel like it helps in the short term, but using pornography in this way is a bit like a sticking plaster – it is only a temporary fix and the issues behind your negative feelings might still be there.
It is important to remember that we are in control of our own behaviour, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel like it. Even if something has triggered you to have a strong emotional reaction, you still have a choice of how to make yourself feel better. You have a choice whether to go online and view pornography, or whether you manage your feelings in a different way.
If you want to view pornography then there are a range of techniques that you could use to help stop yourself. Check out our information on fantasy management.
Over the next week, we encourage you to keep a diary, completing the diary each time you go online. You can have more than one diary entry each day.
Sometimes it can be difficult to know what triggered your feelings before you went online. It can help to think about what you were doing or whether something specific happened before you went online. You might need to spend some time reflecting on this.
Day | Time | How I was feeling before I went online | What did I do online? What type of content did I view? | How long did I spend online? | How did I feel when I was online? | How did I feel after I stopped being online? | Ideas for what I could have done instead |
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Many people have problems with limiting the amount of time they spend viewing adult pornography or how often they view it.
This might be because of drivers. Drivers are psychological factors in your mind that make it harder to control behaviour.
When viewing pornography online, you could see hundreds of different images and videos within minutes. This has a powerful impact on your brain and can make it very difficult for you to control your online behaviour. They affect the way you view adult pornography and your feelings while you are viewing it.
Here are a few examples of how your brain can be affected.
It doesn’t have the same effect because it isn’t new. To get the same level of sexual arousal, you might need to keep viewing new things.
For people who have viewed a lot of adult pornography, this often means they start pushing boundaries and view things that they might have found too extreme, odd or distasteful before.
Seeing or thinking about new and arousing pornography releases a chemical called dopamine into your body, which makes you feel happy and rewarded.
This is because all species, including humans, evolved to try to reproduce so that they don’t go extinct. So your modern brain is linking pornography with its aim to reproduce – ejaculating as many times as possible to impregnate as many females as possible.
This is sometimes called the bikini effect. It can have a bigger effect on people who are unhappy because they have less to lose or more to escape. There is less research into the effect on women.
This means that when you are online and feeling sexually aroused, you might be more likely to take risks, push boundaries and think more about the immediate rewards than the long-term consequences of your online viewing. You might be less likely to think about the negative impact your viewing habits could be having on your life.
Sexual arousal also reduces your ability to think about other people (you have less empathy) so you might be more able to watch films with violence or abuse without feeling uncomfortable or concerned about the people in them.
Advertisers know this, which is why they sometimes use suggestive or sexual pictures when selling things to men.
Thinking about pornography, the pleasure might eventually be less from what you see and more from what you hope to see. You might be rewarded from time to time with a particularly arousing image or film, but for the most part, you may be spending hours online in a state of expectation, and keep searching because you think that there must be something better out there.
You might lose awareness of what else is going on in life and feel like you’re in a bubble. After you stop viewing pornography, you might not have any clear idea of what you thought or felt while you were online.
This is sometimes called a state of flow. There is something that feels good about doing activities that hold your attention. Dopamine is released when your brain is active and focused on a rewarding task. This can help understand why the behaviour continues and you might be drawn to it in the future to escape from life’s stresses.
Using mindfulness, meditation and guided visualisation can help manage emotional triggers to online pornography use. Use a technique that works for you, which you can plan and rehearse in advance. Find out more about relaxation techniques.
Feeling negative effects when you give up pornography is normal. When you view adult pornography, dopamine makes you feel good, so you might feel the opposite to this when you give up.
When you first give up, it might be very tempting to view just a bit of pornography. Don’t test yourself. If you give in to these temptations, you might find that you view more and more and the habit has reformed.
Take a look at our suggestions for places to get more help and information.
The experienced advisors on our confidential helpline can support you if you want to discuss anything covered in this module, have struggled when working through it or want to go through the information with a practitioner to guide you. You can stay anonymous and don’t have to give your real name, location, or any contact details. If you’re not ready to speak to anyone yet, you can also use our live chat or send a secure email.
Many people who have engaged in online sexual behaviour involving children believe that there is a ‘grey area’ between what is legal and illegal. There is not.
This module will help you explore and understand your current sexual and non-sexual fantasies, and the link between your fantasies and your online behaviour
If you are concerned about your worrying or illegal online sexual behaviour and want to stop this behaviour, it is important for you to learn as much as possible about yourself and what you are doing.
This module aims to help you explore and gain understanding your level of control over your current online sexual behaviours, how you have used denial to allow your problematic behaviour to continue and how to make immediate changes to start the change process.
Sexual offending happens in the offline and online world. But some people we work with often tell us they would not have offended without the internet, apps or smartphones.
This module will help you understand, different types of triggers and your own triggers
If you are viewing legal adult pornography then this is your choice and we are not here to shame you for using it or to tell you to stop. But this self-help section will encourage you to think about whether viewing legal adult pornography is helpful or harmful for you.
This module aims to help you explore and gain understanding of how you can start to address your addictions.
This module aims to help you explore and gain understanding of your motivation for engaging sexually with children online, how your behaviour progressed into sexual communication and how you might have justified your behaviour.
This module will help you understand the false justifications offenders use to avoid responsibility for their actions, that these images are of real children being abused and the effects of being photographed on the children in the image.
This module aims to help you to explore and gain understanding of why you collect, how it links to your offending and the relationship between collecting and some of the unsatisfactory aspects of your life.
This module aims to help you explore and gain understanding of why immediate gratification is so powerful and how to manage the desire of immediate gratification.
Our confidential helpline is free and available to anyone concerned about the safety of children.
Lucy Faithfull Foundation offers support and advice for parents, carers, professionals, survivors and communities. Shore is for teenagers worried about sexual behaviour.
Our helpline 0808 1000 900
2 Birch House, Harris Business Park, Hanbury Road
Stoke Prior, Bromsgrove, B60 4DJ
Lucy Faithfull Foundation is a Registered Charity No. 1013025, and is a company limited by guarantee, Registered in England No. 2729957.
Self-help, information and support for those concerned about their inappropriate thoughts or behaviour.
Information and support for those concerned about the behaviour of another adult or those concerned about a child or young persons behaviour or wellbeing.
We offer professionals practical advice, training resources, and support tools to help them recognise, prevent, and respond to child safety concerns effectively.
We can support anyone with a concern about child sexual abuse and its prevention via our self-help resources, programmes and helpline.
As a charity, we rely on the kindness and generosity of people like you to support our vital work to prevent child sexual abuse. And right now, we need your help more than ever.
By donating, fundraising, or simply spreading the word about our work, your support will have a huge impact.