Welcome to the latest news from The Reward Foundation this fine autumn season. In this edition we are pleased to announce the launch of two new books: the French edition of the popular Your Brain on Porn (Les Ravages du Porno sur le Cerveau) and the more challenging Autism, Pornography and Online Sexual Offending, so far only available in Kindle, but soon to be in paperback.

Did you learn about romantic love at school? How can we help teachers and pupils navigate the challenges of those emotional teen years? Also, poets and songwriters can express it so well, but what do the researchers say, less romantically perhaps, about the hormones we produce when we fall in love? Finally, we’ll look at virtual private networks and how well the UK’s Online Safety Act is protecting our children from easy access to hardcore porn.

The long-awaited French translation of YBOP is now available. Tell your francophone friends who might be interested. Purchased the book here (France) and here (Québec). For information about the other translations (now 20 altogether) of this highly educational book, see here.

The challenge:  Autism, Pornography and Online Sexual Offending deals with one of society’s biggest taboos – online sexual offending against children. It does so in a courageous, nuanced and compassionate way using medical research and evidence from real life. How would you react if this happened to a man you know? Read the book then make up your mind.

The facts

Research suggests 1-3% of the population are autistic. Yet a shocking 25% of the men seeking help from child protection charities after downloading indecent images of children, are autistic. Autistic men without intellectual impairment are nine times more likely to die by suicide than non-autistic men.

• Is there something about autism that makes autistic people more vulnerable to problematic porn use?
• Can problematic use lead the unwary to escalate to illegal images?
• With what frequency does looking at sexual images of children online lead to a desire to groom and have sex with a child in person?

Should we imprison offenders and throw away the key? Or, should we dig deeply into the causes and try to prevent it? How do we protect kids, especially autistic ones, from becoming disproportionately active in porn-related harm or becoming victims of it?

Their stories

The book reveals what happened to three, ordinary, married men with good jobs and no previous convictions. Their names are Jack, PJ and Henry. We chart their experience of undiagnosed autism as children, developing a porn addiction as teenagers, escalating to viewing indecent images of children, arrest, then facing the full might of the law. Each one was suicidal yet their journeys are quite different. Together they depict a perfect storm of autism, porn addiction and online offending combining to ruin lives, destroy families and harm society.

Who should read this? 

This book is a must for porn users, people who know or suspect they are autistic, their partners, criminal justice and healthcare professionals, social workers and children’s services, teachers, school leaders, politicians and media professionals.

Read it now on Kindle Autism, Pornography and Online Sexual Offending

Apart from how to make babies, the emotional side of falling in love and its consequences, was and largely still is, largely missing from the school curriculum. The pervasive influence of online porn has become the de factomeans of learning about relationships for our young people today. Digital natives think their parents are out of touch and often shun their advice. So it’s all the more important that the undue influence of the profits-driven porn industry with no interest in your child’s wellbeing, is countered.

See The Reward Foundation’s 7 free lesson plans for schools with special editions for England & Wales, for Scotland, for US and internationally. They are interactive and evidence based. Have pupils become jury members when presented with evidence for and against porn use. In the lesson about love, we ask what makes for a good relationship? What role does trust have in an intimate relationship? What are the risks and rewards of pornography use over time? We don’t show any pornography in these lessons.

The recent review called The neuroendocrinology of love, Krishna G. Seshadri, tells us “While poets and philosophers are more adept at defining love, for the purposes of this review, this particular definition seems to be apt: Love is an emergent property of an ancient cocktail of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters.

Abstract: Romantic love could be considered as a collection of activities associated with the acquisition and retention of emotions needed to survive and reproduce. These emotions change the individual’s behavioural strategies in a way that will increase the likelihood of achieving these goals. Love may be defined as an emergent property of an ancient cocktail of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. It appears that lust, attachment and attraction appear to be distinct but intertwined processes in the brain each mediated by its own neurotransmitters and circuits. These circuits feed on and reinforce each other. Sexual craving is mediated by testosterone and oestrogen and has the amygdala as an important centre. Attraction is mediated by hormones of stress and reward including dopamine, norepinephrine cortisol and the serotinergic system and has the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area as key mediators

Keywords: Love, monogamy, neuroendocrine, oxytocin, prairie vole, vasopressin”

For details of the paper see here

This is a pretty technical area and so we shall hand you over to one of our esteemed colleagues, John Carr OBE, who is an expert on age assurance mechanisms, not least in his capacity as Secretary of the Children’s Coalition of Charities for the UK. Here’s a taster of his longer blog on the matter.

“On 25th July 2025 UK law changed.

Under the (very popular) Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA), online porn providers now have to establish age gates, guarded by an age verification system (AV). Under-18s should no longer be able to access or be exposed to porn on the internet from within the UK, whether accidentally or intentionally

Big changes

In my previous blog I noted there has apparently been a massive drop in the number of UK visitors to porn sites.

Pornhub say they had 77% fewer customers from our green and pleasant land. That’s a huge precentage but it comes from Pornhub so I am wary. They usually have an angle even if, as here, it isn’t instantly obvious.

On the face of it the most likely explanation is rather than go through an AV process a great many people simply turned away. In addition, whether they wanted to or not, children couldn’t complete an AV process to pass themselves off as 18 or above so that too would contribute to the stated decline.

Not everyone is convinced by that explanation.

The BBC journalist who covered the story was not alone in wondering whether or to what extent the decrease in porn site visitor numbers from the UK could be explained at least in part by people starting to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). But how large or significant was that part, particularly in respect of children?”

When you’re out in nature kicking up those autumn leaves, think about sharing our website and our (mostly) free materials with friends, colleagues and family. They’ll thank you for it. We hope.