Therapy

Porn Addicts Head to Church

Religious groups designed for female porn addicts.

People have turned to religion for counseling for centuries, but some churches have added a new twist to the tradition: an upswing in porn addiction counseling targeted specifically at women, a demographic they say is too often ignored in discussions of the problem. “Most churches have male leadership, and if you want to pitch an event like that, they’ll say, ‘Our women don’t struggle with that,' ” said Craig Gross, a youth pastor who founded a counseling website called XXX Church. “This is going to be the next wave, but you’re going to get a lot of blank stares,” Gross added. DVDs, online workshops, and other websites for female porn addicts are slowly turning into big business, with some sites drawing up to 250,000 unique visitors per month. Unlike traditional counseling, church programs still emphasize faith-based solutions to addiction, encouraging prayer as a means of recovering “sexual purity.”