Published: 18:37 BST, 5 September 2026 | Updated: 18:37 BST, 5 September 2026
Night after night, while her family slept, Arleny Abreu Quintero would sit glued to her computer.
The hours would slip by unnoticed towards dawn as she obsessively pored over a seemingly endless torrent of images on the screen.
By morning, the teenager would drag herself into school exhausted, struggling to concentrate on what her teachers were saying.
But it wasn't simply tiredness that troubled her. The reason was a secret she was deeply ashamed of.
Arleny was struggling with something more commonly associated with young men – compulsive online pornography use.
What had begun as curiosity after she first stumbled across explicit material at just 13 had, within a few years, become an obsession that dominated her life.
At her worst, she would spend hours – sometimes virtually entire days – watching adult content, then stay up through the night consuming more.
Recalling those early years, Arleny, now 19 and from New York, says: 'It changed the way I viewed reality.
Arleny Abreu Quintero(right) has opened up about her secret porn addiction as a teenager that made her sexualise her own family, school teachers and classmates
Ms Quintero said the ordeal was 'disturbing and uncomfortable' and made her feel 'so much shame'
'My mindset became unusually sexual, and I'd have disturbing thoughts about people in my life that I did not want to have those thoughts about.
But it was during the Covid pandemic that her problem began to spiral.
When lockdown restrictions left her stuck at home in the spring of 2020, with little to occupy her and cut off from friends, the hours she spent watching pornography rapidly increased.
'I suddenly had all the time in the world, so I started watching it every day,' she says.
