If you’ve had the disturbing occasion to know how nihilistic and obscene pornography is today, you know torture is standard fare. So is racism, incest, and teen rape.
PornMD, a search engine for the MindGeek platforms of trash and criminality including Pornhub, reports its most popular searches include “very young,” “young Asian,” “young anal sex” and, at the other end of life’s spectrum, “granny anal compilation” — perverse options that normalize anti-social behavior and impulses.
As one extremely disturbing example, earlier this year, Pornhub’s most-watched video, with more than 4 million views worldwide, showed a teenage girl being electrocuted, burned with wax, and penetrated by a machine, while her hands and feet were shackled and her mouth was gagged. She screamed in pain throughout this torture.
And that is just one platform where hardcore pornography, or rather, illegal obscenity, exists. There are countless others.
Those of us with eyes open and hearts punctured by this cultural degradation are puzzled why the Department of Justice has prosecuted zero cases against hardcore pornography, despite President Trump’s October 2016 pledge to “aggressively enforce” the nation’s obscenity laws.
Attorney General William Barr revealed his incomplete understanding of this problem in a little-noticed interview three months ago. The nation’s top prosecutor explained that the DOJ was overwhelmed by child sexual abuse material. He said the department had “our hands full right now” combating the most despicable material so that there’s no time for investigating “other kinds of pornography.” But there is a bigger picture that the attorney general seems to be missing.
First, the “adult” obscenity coursing through the internet, easily accessed by our youngest, most impressionable citizens, normalizes and encourages pornography consumers to seek more and more heinous material such as that pertaining to child sex abuse. That’s how the algorithms work; that’s how the addictive mind works.
Second, brain science teaches us that overexposure to pornography undoes the capacity for good decision-making. It undermines the part of the mind supporting judgment, much as drug addiction does. A person who binges on videos brandished as “very young” is not far from seeking “very, very young,” especially with depleted executive function.
As a result of the federal government’s apparent indifference, online pornography has only gotten more brutal, putting at risk the women in the scenes as well as its consumers, and that won’t end until the DOJ’s criminal division ramps up obscenity prosecutions.
In his Jewish Press interview, the attorney general described what conditions should exist to inspire greater enthusiasm at the DOJ for obscenity cases. He suggested “trying to build a greater public consensus about its harms to society” to show “broad consensus for a big crackdown” on obscenity.
Well, 250 child protection and anti-trafficking organizations, as well as experts and survivors, have been demonstrating in real-time that consensus exists for a “crackdown” against the Goliath of this market, Pornhub, the world’s biggest pornography website. Together, they support a fast-moving petition drive. In fewer than 10 weeks, more than 830,000 people have endorsed the need to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. This abuse machine doesn’t care that nonconsensual exploitation and human trafficking are rampant on its platform. It couldn’t care less that children can access disturbing moving pictures of depredation without ever having to verify their age.
But petitions are certainly not as powerful as prosecutions.
What else does Barr need in order to kick-start the judicial remedy we need? He thinks we should “research and analyze [pornography’s] impact on the development of young people.”
But already, definitive medical evidence shows the harms of obscene pornography on developing minds. We somberly share this exhaustive report detailing current research on this very issue: “The Public Health Harms of Pornography: How pornography fuels child sexual abuse, compulsive sexual behavior, violence against women, commercial sexual exploitation, and more.”
While the federal government fails to act, untold numbers of victims, in front of the camera and watching online, will be harmed. The DOJ’s failure to act on obscenity is the very policy that has given birth to the child sex abuse material crisis it can’t cope with — a crisis that will continue to escalate as long as obscenity is ignored and left unchecked.
Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan, Ph.D., is the director of government relations at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the leading national organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health crisis of pornography. (www.endsexualexploitation.org) Twitter: @EkGaetan
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated 830,000 people signed a petition to shut down Pornhub in less than 10 months. The correct timeline is less than 10 weeks. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
