Harmless Fun or Public Health Hazard?

by Daniel Weiss

Testimony by Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality, Focus on the Family, at the May 19, 2005, Summit on Pornography: Obscenity Enforcement, Corporate Participation and Violence against Women and Children.

Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this forum. My name is Daniel Weiss and I serve as Focus on the Family’s Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality. As we consider pornography and the law, we must answer a foundational question: Does the state have a compelling interest in protecting people from obscene materials?

Folks on this panel may agree that the state does have such an interest, but U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster came to a different conclusion. Dismissing the Justice Department’s case against Extreme Associates, a company producing rape and torture films, Lancaster wrote that “the government can no longer rely on the advancement of a moral code … as a legitimate, let alone a compelling state interest.”

Aside from ignoring clear Supreme Court precedent, Lancaster’s ruling recognized no harm posed by obscene materials. However this case is ultimately decided, it underscores a declining lack of recognition in legal and cultural realms of pornography's threats to individuals, families, and society.

Ultimately, for obscenity law to be consistently and effectively enforced, our culture must understand the facts on pornography.

More than 25 years ago, Dr. Victor Cline identified the progressive nature of pornography addiction. Once addicted, a person’s need for pornography escalates both in frequency and in deviancy. The person then grows desensitized to the material, no longer getting a thrill from what was once exciting. Finally, this escalation and desensitization drives many addicts to act out their fantasies on others.¹

At a Senate hearing last fall, medical experts corroborated Cline’s early breakthroughs. New technology is allowing doctors to look inside addicts' brains to determine just how damaging pornography is. The witnesses described research showing the similarity of porn addiction to cocaine addiction. Further, because images are stored in the brain and can be recalled at any moment, these experts believe that a porn addiction may be harder to break than a heroin addiction.²

Now, no one is seriously advocating the legalization of cocaine or heroin, but somehow the pornography industry has convinced a large segment of the population that viewing porn is not just harmless fun, but is also a fundamental right.

By not calling pornography what it is — highly addictive and destructive material — we are heading for troubled times. Dr. Patrick Carnes, a leading researcher on sex addiction, estimates that 3 to 6 percent of Americans are sexually addicted.³ That’s as many as 20 million people.

This epidemic isn’t confined to individuals, however. Pornography is one of the leading causes of family breakdown today.

Two-thirds of the divorce lawyers attending a 2002 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers said excessive interest in online porn contributed to more than half of the divorces they handled that year. They also said pornography had an almost non-existent role in divorce just seven or eight years earlier.⁴

A poll conducted through my own organization’s Web site found that 50 percent of more than 50,000 respondents had been negatively affected by pornography.

This devastation isn’t confined to adults either. The Justice Department estimates that nine of 10 children between the ages of 8 and 16 have been exposed to pornography online.⁵ Software company Symantec found that 47 percent of school-age children receive pornographic spam on a daily basis,⁶ and representatives from the pornography industry told Congress’ COPA Commission that as much as 20 to 30 percent of the traffic to some pornographic Web sites are children.⁷

Ralph DiClemente, a behavioral scientist at Emory University, described the danger of this exposure. He said, “[Children] can’t just put [porn] into their worldview, because they don’t have one.”⁸ He went on to explain that pornography becomes a building block in a child’s mental and emotional development.

When pornography becomes a filter through which the rest of life is understood, serious damage occurs. A 2001 report found that more than half of all sex offenders in Utah were adolescents — and children as young as 8 years old were committing felony sexual assault.⁹

The porn industry fights laws such as the Child Online Protection Act, which requires pornographers to use age verification systems, because they know this flood of pornographic imagery is creating a new generation of consumers.

This increased culture-wide sexualization is generating incredible public health risks. One in five adults in the United States has an STD,¹⁰ and 19 million new STD infections occur annually, almost half of them among youth ages 15 to 24.¹¹

Pornography is also a significant factor in sexual violence. The FBI reports that the most common interest among serial killers is hardcore pornography. Another study found that 87 percent of child molesters were regular consumers of hardcore pornography.¹² Just last week, the nation mourned 8-year-old Jessica DeLaTorre, who was abducted, raped, and murdered by a porn addict who had viewed child pornography at an Internet café the night before.

Many of you may also recall Ted Bundy, the serial killer from Florida. In an interview with Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson, just hours before he was executed, Bundy described how early exposure to pornography consumed him and led him down his murderous path. He said he was ultimately responsible for his actions, but that the messages in pornography primed him for those actions.

As horrifying as this is, we should not be surprised. Although the Supreme Court was clear in Miller v. California that hardcore pornography enjoys no First Amendment protection, lax federal and state law enforcement has essentially given obscenity the protection denied to it in the Constitution.

This lack of enforcement has allowed a back-alley enterprise to grow into an unprecedented global trade in human persons. Pornography turns people into commodities. Men and women become sexual objects to be bought, sold, used and discarded. The last time the United States recognized human beings as consumer goods, it took a civil war to end it.

We should not be shocked with skyrocketing STD infections or marital and family breakdown. Nor when men rape women and children or even when children rape one another. These developments are entirely consistent with the explosive growth in pornography.

It's not harmless adult entertainment, as some would like us to believe, but a real, measurable and undeniable threat to individuals, families and society.

The crucial question before us is not whether or not the state has a compelling interest in protecting society from the harm of pornography, but rather, given the overwhelming evidence of harm, why it chooses to do so little?

Thank you.

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