DriveThru – Get What You Need

Yesterday was National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Focus on the Family released a statement praising President Obama’s Proclamation on trafficking prevention. We focused on the link between pornography and sex trafficking and asked the president to direct his Justice Department to devote more resources to fighting porn and other “feeder industries” that fuel demand for trafficking victims.

One important point left out of our statement was a troubling aspect in the precise wording of President Obama’s statement. He wrote: “Whether they are trapped in forced sexual or labor exploitation, human trafficking victims cannot walk away, but are held in service through force, threats, and fear.”

The phrase “forced sexual or labor exploitation” is a departure from the language of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act which is the current law of the land and for which anti-trafficking activists have fought for years. Michael Horowitz highlights the danger of this subtle shift in language, which promotes “the notion that sex trafficking is not per se unlawful and that criminal sex trafficking offenses require proof of fraud, force or coercion that is a required element of proof in all forced labor/labor slavery cases.”

Convincing women to prove they were forced or defrauded is extremely difficult because of the brainwashing, threats and intimidation they receive at the hands of their traffickers. To adopt this greater and more difficult burden of proof would be an enormous step backward in the fight against sex trafficking.

I was shocked to hear of a grisly death in Miami early morning January 1st. Police were called to investigate a dumpster on fire and found the burned body of 26-year-old model Paula Sladewski. Sladewski, a former Playboy model, was in town to party with her boyfriend.

I don’t know what depresses me most about this.

Is it the tragic death of a young woman seemingly caught up in the high life?

Or is it that the New York Daily News couldn’t report the story without including near-naked photos? Was Sladewski no more than a one-dimensional sexual object to be exploited even after death?

Maybe it’s that too many young girls suffer from the normalization of pornography. The porn world’s most famous celebrity, Jenna Jameson, said she was shocked when 13-year-old girls appeared at signings for her book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star and said she was their hero.

Paula Sladewski isn’t the only young woman involved with pornography whose life was tragically cut short. The Seamless Fabric examines the commercial sex industry through the brutal death of Emily Sander, also known in the porn world as Zoe Zane. I don’t blame porn directly for this violence, but I also think we shouldn’t ignore the consequences to nurturing pornographic fantasies that degrade and dehumanize women.

The wheels of justice may turn slowly at times, but at least they turn. A Kansas judge will hear oral arguments in the trial of Israel Mireles, who is charged with capital murder, rape and aggravated criminal sodomy in the death of 18-year-old Emily Sander in 2007. Emily was the focus of a powerful Focus on the Family report last year that highlighted the strong connections between pornography, prostitution and sex trafficking. If you still think of Playboy when people rail against pornography, you need to read The Seamless Fabric. It will change the way you see this issue.

Last December, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy released a study which found that nearly 20 percent of 13-19-year-olds had sent a sexually explicit photo with their cell phone. Today, the Pew Internet Project released its report showing much lower numbers—only 4% of teens claimed to have “sexted” with 15 percent having received photos from someone else.

Pew admits that teens might be underreporting because of high social disapproval of the behavior, and the truth is likely somewhere in the middle of these two reports. The lower number may also be attributed to several high-profile arrests of teens for child pornography offenses.

Dr. Judith Reisman makes a great point about so-called “sexting.” She explains that these kids are doing what kids are supposed to do—that is, they are mimicking adult culture. The kids aren’t the problem. They are merely reflecting a huge problem with an adult culture that has too often made its peace with pornography. If we want kids to be sexually responsible, we must first show them how to do it.

A groundbreaking new study out of Canada is determined to end our concern over pornography. Get this, a postdoctoral student at the University of Montreal, Simon Louis Lajeunesse, set out to determine how pornography impacts men’s attitudes about sexuality. The first step was to find men who hadn’t looked at pornography. “We couldn’t find any,” he says.

But that didn’t stop him! He found an almost absolutely certainly statistically significant sample of 20 men who all looked at porn and started his research with them. Although he just started, he has already concluded that “Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship which they all want as harmonious and fulfilling as possible.

So, let me get this straight: you asked 20 porn using men if porn impacted them and they all said no? Wow. Every single one of them? OK. That settles it. No baseline measurement + study not done + small sample size + good answers = a call to the media to announce findings. I predict we will never hear anything from this “researcher” again.

Anyway, Dr. Pat Fagan at the Family Research Council isn’t buying it. He released a 30-page paper on Wednesday detailing the enormous negative impact of pornography on individuals, families and society. I’ll be blogging more about this in the next few days, but you can read the full paper here.

Reflecting on Brave New World, twenty-seven years after writing it, Aldous Huxley explains how political control would be achieved in the future:

The society described in Brave New World is a world-state, in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legaliz­ing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destruc­tive (or creative) emotional tension. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

The majority in Western nations have fully embraced the distracting tyranny of sexual licentiousness, but even war-torn Muslim-dominated regions of the world have carved out the potential for political control through sexual indulgence. Hanin Ghaddad describes in Foreign Policy how Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon are turning otherwise apathetic citizens into political supporters by expanding a sexual practice called mutaa marriage. She writes:

“Mutaa is a form of “temporary marriage” only acceptable within Shiite communities, one that allows couples to have religiously sanctioned sex for a limited period of time, without any commitments, and without the obligatory involvement of religious figures.”

She interviews Shiite writer and activist Lokman Slim, who explains:

“After the 2006 war, Iranian money came to Lebanon in abundance, and money opened the door to sexual luxury that could not be ignored or controlled,” noted Slim. “Therefore, Hezbollah decided it is easier to allow sex under certain religious titles in order to keep the control over the community.”

This kind of political machination has been going on for decades in the United States. There is a concerted, consistent effort to sexualize children through compulsory so-called comprehensive sex-education encouraging sex with anyone at any time (now trying to get into kindergartens) and through highly sexualized media aimed directly at children. In fact, 9 of 10 school aged kids have seen pornography online and those in positions of power in our federal government do nothing to stop it, including the simple enforcement of existing laws against obscenity online.

If Huxley and Hezbollah are right, one could speculate that at least some of our leaders want this to happen. If they can foment distorted sexual desire at a young age and then promise to fulfill the sexual fantasies they intentionally create, they will have an army of supporters who will fight against “moral” efforts to end this tyranny which is often hidden behind patriotic calls to preserve “free speech.” Welcome to the Brave New States of America.

Pay attention to those promoting unrestrained sexual license. They intend to be your masters.

A common defense of pornography is that it is a private activity or a choice among consenting adults. In the wi-fi age, this is no longer true. Washington Post staff writer Monica Hesse examines the trend of viewing pornography on public transportation. People are being held captive to public porn use on planes, trains and automobiles, which leaves it neither private nor consenting. She writes:

Perhaps this is the real problem: the increasingly blurred boundary between public and private. If we are so accustomed to burying our noses in tiny screens, carrying our entertainment in and out of the house, perhaps people are simply getting confused as to where they are.

The confusion over private and public boundaries conforms to porn’s design. Pornography inspires a self-centered “taking” approach to sex, so viewing it in public is a logical extension of this narcissistic impulse made possible through better technology. After all, as every porn fantasy teaches, it’s all about ME.

Pornography is seemingly everywhere. It appears in films, TV, music, video games, on iPods, cell phones, the Internet, email, cable, and in the hotel room, supermarket, and the gas station. There was a time that you had to go looking for pornography, but now it finds you whether you want it or not.

What has this flood of pornography done to our attitudes about it? That’s the question Morality in Media asked in a new Harris Interactive poll. The results may surprise you.

• 76% of U.S. adults disagree that “viewing hardcore adult pornography on the Internet is morally acceptable”
• 74% disagree that “viewing hardcore adult pornography on the Internet provides, generally, harmless entertainment”

These results show that Dr. Dobson was right that fighting pornography is still a winnable war. We need to do a better job of making our case to the general public and mobilizing in such a way that people want to play a part and are equipped to do so.

To get started fighting pornography in your corner of the country, check out our PDF publication The Grassroots Guide to Protecting your Community from Pornography.

In a recent Washington Times commentary, Alliance Defense Fund President Alan Sears wonders aloud why the Obama Justice Department is “taking a profoundly laissez-faire attitude toward a criminal enterprise” that is destroying our nation’s children. He is speaking of the pornography industry, which has flourished in the last 17 years under lax or non-existent law enforcement.

Sears knows what he is talking about. As Executive Director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in the mid-1980s, he saw firsthand the devastation such material wrought in the lives of individuals, families, and communities. And all this was before the Internet came into widespread use.

Sears is also concerned why Attorney General Eric Holder hasn’t followed his own advice from a decade ago when he served as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno. Back then, Holder wrote:

“Priority should be given to cases involving large-scale distributors who realize substantial income from multi-state operations and cases in which there is evidence of organized crime involvement….Because of the nature of the Internet and the availability of agents trained in conducting criminal investigations in cyberspace, investigation and prosecution of Internet obscenity is particularly suitable for federal resources.”

Instead, nothing. No large scale distributors or Internet operators are being indicted. Not even small-time crooks. Nada.

Sears concludes that too many judges, legislators and government officials feel pornography is no big deal, ignoring volumes of research on its harms. Or, as he puts it, “you have to believe the unbelievable to justify defending the indefensible.”

The hard work of pro-family activists against a top level domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) for pornography may be undone. Last week the Guardian reported that the U.S. Department of Commerce has ended its oversight of the Internet. Add to this ICANN’s proposal to relax Internet naming rules and the .XXX domain seems a given. John Carr, a UK government adviser, told the BBC:

“I think all responsible pornography companies will move their domains into the .xxx area. We’ve never said pornography should not exist on the internet, but it shouldn’t be easy for children and young people to get at it or for people who don’t want to see it to come across it.”

Yes, well. We all wait with bated breath for a responsible pornography company to appear. If anyone believes this plan will keep porn away from kids, consider the plans of Stuart Lawley, the driving force behind the .XXX domain. In 2007 he told Family News in Focus that he planned to donate part of the $60 registration fee to a non-profit group comprised of free speech advocates and members of the adult entertainment community. Its mission? To protect the children, of course. He said:

“A lot of that money will be spent on parental awareness, …child education in the classroom on a national basis to make sure the people know what triple X is and, if they choose to, how to deploy filters and how to make those filters more successful.”

Now we know what a responsible pornography company does: It visits our nation’s schools to teach children all about the new pornography domain.