People are often unaware of their longing to experience relational abundance through healthy connection. Those that are aware of their hunger often don't know how to find or create it. ARI's desire is to help to transform lives through healthy relationships with God, self and others. When the relational void is filled, people experience healthy worth and real value. They realize that they matter to God and others.
Today's young people are being lured into making poor choices that lead to addictive and destructive lifestyles. These choices appear glamorous and sensational due to false messages conveyed through the media industry.
Movies, videos, television, music, books, magazines, and newspapers both shape and reflect the values of the American culture. Media has contributed a great deal to perpetuate practices and beliefs that are destructive to all of society, but especially the young. Behavior that leads today's youth to entrapment, addiction, and eventually destruction is glamorized by the media and endorsed by our society as normal. Young people are lulled into believing that pornography, alcohol, and drugs are simply a part of adult life.
"Many people, including children and adolescents, learn about sex from pornography; it shapes their beliefs, attitudes, and expectations. The implication of the role of pornography in forcing sexual attitudes in adolescents is troubling." John Mason, PhD., Assistant Secretary of Health, Address to the Religious Alliance Against Pornography, The Harm of Pornography
"The teenagers who grew up with cable and the VCR come to the table already saturated with sex. They've never known a time without Calvin Klein ads and MTV. By the time they see porn, they've already seen so many naked people they're pre-jaded." New York Times, May 20, 2001, Naked Capitalists
Today's media is a strong and powerful force. Youth are inundated with pornographic images and they are living in a culture where porn is now considered mainstream.
"At $10 billion, porn is no longer a sideshow to the mainstream like, say, the $600 million Broadway theater industry -- it is the mainstream… Sex sells and it drives the media, and it always has. Billboards, movies, ads, commercials. It's what we're thinking about at all times of the day.
"The 4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography is larger than the annual revenue accrued by either the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. But that's literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States…People pay more money for pornography than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." NY Times, May 20, 2001, Naked Capitalists
In 1955 the Playboy centerfolds were less explicit than many of the covers of today's mainstream magazines and advertisements today. In a recent Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, youth (ages 12-18) were pictured in complete nudity. The catalog contains few pages of clothing, but several pages of children pictured nude.
American society is obsessed and saturated with sex. Sex-charged images blatantly appear everywhere one turns. These visual images have incredible power to shape thinking and behavior. It is as impossible to grow up in innocence in the culture of today as it is to avoid these images. The young are especially vulnerable; whether our children will be exposed to pornography is no longer a valid question. They will. The question is, "Will they be equipped to make split-second, life-giving decisions when they are barraged with toxic messages?"
