“Adults allowing our young children unfettered access to pornographic material is just so clearly wrong, and leads to so many negative consequences, that I am doing whatever I can to put a stop to it.” John Van Arnam

Over the past twenty-six years, John has been acutely aware of the all but invisible health challenge to young people occurring in our society. Internet pornography exposure has now manifested into the inescapable alteration of our young people’s personalities through their early and continual exposure to it, and the clear connection between this early exposure and depression, aggression, loneliness, sexting, grooming by adults, assault, partner violence, and human sex trafficking. Porn exposure is the root cause of these challenges.

As a graduate from Syracuse University with a degree in psychology, John headed to the West Coast and took a job as a salesperson selling search marketing to internet businesses. It was there he first observed the porn industry’s dominance of the internet, at almost 20% of search, and its seemingly unrestricted access to anyone. Collaboration with Yahoo!, Google and MSFT for over 8 years, furthered John’s knowledge of the ongoing challenge, and solutions, to control inappropriate and undesirable content from an underage user’s computer. John won awards for placing fraud filters and parental controls within the search engines in an effort to reduce underage exposure. In 2002, John also successfully worked to place a 1×1 pixel on all global adult websites to guard against CSAM, which at the time was called “child pornography.”

John recognized the slow growing infiltration of online pornography into the culture of our youth as nothing short of the hijacking of our young people’s innocence. This included their future relationships and marriages, self-esteem, mental and physical health, personal safety, and risky behavior at ever younger and younger ages. Pornography also robs a child of a once in a lifetime opportunity to gradually explore the natural joy found in healthy human relationships, as the average age of this first exposure is generally accepted to be 12 years old.

It is from this knowledge and experience that John created The Third Talk®, a fact based, statistically accurate, and easily absorbable strategy to initiate pornography-prevention conversations with young people. A powerful advocate for healthy children with an unapologetic delivery, John provides straight forward phrases to start a lasting discussion within your family about avoiding youth exposure to online pornography. His work in schools, community events, PTAs, churches, and individual families, has allowed him to develop a unique and effective strategy for eliminating the harm caused to our children by this exposure.