Last year, a Milwaukee man was convicted of trading explicit photos of his own pre-teen daughter online. When discovered and arrested, the shocked parents of the local community asked aloud: “Why?” Pressed to explain, the man’s lawyer replied: "He hasn't been able to really answer that."
The collective sigh you hear is what many families experience when confronted with the stark and dark realities of child pornography: “we haven’t been able to answer that”.
Psychologists have adopted the word “habituation” to refer to the denigrated state that many porn addicts succumb to: an abyss where the usual pornographic fix doesn’t cut it anymore. At this stage the porn addict, like his peer the druggie, seeks after more and more and worse and worse kinds of material to satiate the chemical releases which the brain has adapted to.
5-year-old Destiny Norton was playing outside in the hot Utah summer of 2006. She was lured into the home of a neighbor, suffocated and then, the unspeakable. The 20-year-old murderer/rapist later told the media: “I have now become a strong advocate against pornography.”
Just last month the Supreme Court upheld existing child pornography laws which help law enforcement agencies crack down on this ugly market. Last week three ISPs in New York agreed to block and remove any and all child pornography on their servers.
Let’s be clear: this is a difficult situation any way you cut it. Earlier this year County Attorney Troy Rawlings of Utah was faced with the prospect of charging 27 people with felonies for producing and sending child pornography via cell phones. The problem? They were all 13-year-old middle-schoolers. The odd nexus of technology, amorality and teenage curiosity may just get the best of us. But can we be content with cleaning the grime but not curing the water?
Fighting Pornography
Those who defend this societal habit are running short on excuses. Pornography addiction is a brutal vice eating away at our culture. But here’s the good news for those in the fight: the slow ship of legal recourse is beginning to turn around and science is playing a vital role to bolster our claim that pornography is harmful.
For years citizen efforts to drive SOBs (sexually oriented businesses) and SEM (sexually explicit material) out of our communities have hit a brick wall. Morality is something that many courts are loathed to acknowledge. Couple this handicap with the significant resources of the pornography industry and a level playing field nowhere to be found.
Local prosecutors face serious financial burdens as experienced porn industry defense teams swoop in with innumerable legal maneuvers. Its no wonder that the Bush administration has failed to prosecute anything other than the most beastly pornography related crimes. The breadth of the addiction, the scant resources at hand, and the serious legal opposition that follows is decidedly tough for any county, district, state or federal entity.
However, recent victories in Florida and elsewhere show promising signs that communities have had enough and are willing to call out obscenity and kill it dead. It was encouraging that Justice Scalia began his majority opinion reiterating their standing position: “We have long held that obscene speech—sexually explicit material that violates fundamental notions of decency—is not protected by the First Amendment.” The tables are turning.
Consider the following:
· A study commissioned by the UK Ministry of Justice last fall found that extreme sexual material definitely leads to violent behavior.
· Recent studies show that individuals who indulge in online pornography and virtual adultery are 3 times more likely to commit the act in reality.
· Other scientific studies underway expect to find that the brains of pornography addicts are physically altered and even damaged.
It appears the analogy to drug use is more than just rhetorical. An adaptation on the old television ad is way overdue: “This is your brain. This is your brain on porn.”