Porn, sex trafficking said to be ‘completely interwoven’

FPI  / February 12, 2020

The link between pornography and sex trafficking is undeniable, anti-trafficking activists say.

“It’s completely interwoven, porn and sex trafficking, and you find the same characters in both,” anti-sex trafficking activist Jaco Booyens told The Daily Caller.

“Many of the women and girls who are in the porn industry are actively being sex trafficked. They’re being hired and rented by the porn industry from pimps,” said Booyens.

In a Feb. 9 report for the Daily Caller News Foundation, social issues reporters Mary Margaret Olohan noted that anti-sex trafficking leaders she spoke with “said the porn industry fuels demand for violent, obscene, or child-related sexual fantasies, prompting porn consumers to sex, through pimps, from sex-trafficking victims. These advocates also maintain that pimps engaged in sex trafficking blackmail victims through sexually explicit videos and sell victims to producers of pornography.”

Olohan noted the pornography website Pornhub had 42 billion visits to its site during 2019, 39 billion searches performed site-wide, an average of 115 million visits per day, and 6.83 million new videos uploaded.

“To put this in perspective — if you strung all of 2019’s new video content together and started watching them way back in 1850, you’d still be watching them today,” the Pornhub website stated.

“Porn is the feeder drug to sex trafficking. There’s no question about it,” said Booyens, founder of the SHAREtogether organization which fights against child sex trafficking.

“It’s unquestionable. Just like an opioid. It’s the feeder drug for someone to end up one day with heroin. You don’t start with heroin, start with a heavy drug like that. You start with something that’s accessible.”

Booyens told the Daily Caller that there is not a single pedophile that his organization has tracked down during the past 25 years that was not addicted to porn.

“Porn was in their journey. Am I saying every porn user is going to abuse a child? No,” he said. “But it’s feeding the industry. It’s feeding demand.”

In 2017, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation released a study which found significant negative effects of pornography on young people.

The study found that 93 percent boys and 62 percent of girls are exposed to pornography during their youth. It found that 49 percent of college-aged males first encountered pornography before they reached their teens, and 64 percent of people between the ages of 13 and 24 actively seek out porn at least once a week.

The negative effects of porn on young people, the study found, includes developmental impacts on the brain, poor emotional bonds with caregivers, viewing women as sex objects, sending sexually explicit images, risky sexual behavior, physical and sexual victimization, and likelihood of viewing animal and child porn at an older age.

The center found that 19 percent of men in the study were clinically addicted to cybersex.

Pornography, particularly obscene and child pornography, “wets the appetite of the consumer for more extreme and more deviant types of content,” Enough is Enough founder Donna Hughes told the Daily Caller.

Hughes added that obscene pornography depicts extreme sexual acts such as “bestiality, anal sex, multiple abusers abusing one woman, urination or defecation pornography, rape,” and more.

These types of content fuel the desire to act out those fantasies by which they have been aroused because they are “highly addictive,” Hughes said.

Federal law criminalizes the distribution, transportation, shipping, selling, mailing, and producing with intent to sell or distribute obscene matter, including obscene pornography. Those who are convicted of these crimes face fines and imprisonment.

Free Press International