Pornography is Prostitution for Mass Consumption
An interview with Lisa Thompson, Salvation Army liaison for the Abolition of Sexual Trafficking
Citizen magazine conducted this interview in May 2008.
Citizen: Pat Trueman says pornography is what creates the demand for illicit sex, and Melissa Farley says it’s men’s ‘rehearsal for prostitution.’ You agree?
Thompson: Yeah, I totally agree with that. It’s like a primer–you know, sitting down a 6-year-old with their first-grade reading primer. You hand a man or a boy pornography, and yet somehow the public doesn’t believe this isn’t going to translate into actual behavior and actually have a consequence for real relationships?
I think we need to completely retool how we conceptualize pornography. When you look at definitions of prostitution–that it’s the exchange of a sex act for something of value—well, that’s what’s going on in pornography. You have these sex acts being exchanged; somebody’s being remunerated for that exchange.
Citizen: As Melissa Farley says, why is it not prostitution just because there’s a camera in the room?
Thompson: Exactly. The primary difference between pornography and buying prostitution in person is the vehicle by which you’re consuming that sex act—who the end consumer is. So, with the one-on-one exchanges, the people who are exchanging the sex acts are right there in person, doing it with each other. But pornography is prostitution for mass consumption. I didn’t invent that, but I’m happy to repeat it. Commercial sex acts are involved, somebody’s receiving something of value for that sex act–so, how is that not prostitution?
People who are sitting at home looking at your pornography magazine might as well think of yourself as a buyer, as a john. I don’t like using the term ‘john’ because I think it’s too normalizing of the behavior that these men are engaging in. It sort of whitewashes what they’re doing. I like to call them ‘sex exploiters.’ When I’m being more kind, I might just call them ‘buyers.’
Citizen: Would you agree with the view that pornography, stripping and prostitution are basically interchangeable parts in the ‘seamless fabric’ of commercial sexual exploitation?
Thompson: Yes. Sex trafficking is sort of the caboose of the train, where it’s the most egregious manifestation of human rights abuses that involves the commercial sex industry. And most people can look at that and say, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s exploitation.’ But as you move up the train, it gets a little harder for people to understand that they’re just degrees of the same problem.
The other cars on this train are going to include prostitution and pornography and stripping and live sex shows and so forth. And then at the head of the train you’ve got that engine that’s completely fueled by demand. It’s just like coals being thrown on the fire, and so it’s speeding down the track. There’s just a lot of different ways that these issues are interconnected.
So, you have pornography, for instance, being used as the training manual for women and girls who are trafficked into prostitution. If you’re a young girl trafficked from
Citizen: How does stripping fit into the picture?
Thompson: Stripping is just a gateway into prostitution. And yet, stripping is so normalized in our culture, particularly through pop songs–‘I’m in Love with a Stripper’–and sending the message that this is what women and girls are meant to do and that this is normal. Oprah having her “Release Your Inner Sexpot” shows and having a stripper pole on the Oprah show—that kind of thing. It’s very normalizing, as opposed to seeing just how completely degrading and objectifying that is.
I finally went to some clubs, and it was worse than I imagined. When you’re involved in stripping, tolerated sexual harassment is an on-the-job requirement. It’s part and parcel of the employment activity.
Citizen: How about the argument that we’ve focused too much on the supply side, treating girls as criminals rather than victims, and we should take tougher action against the demand side–the sexual exploiters? The kind of approaches that Donna Hughes has promoted, like publishing men’s names and alternatives to incarceration such as ‘john schools.’
Thompson: I totally support and endorse it and think we need to do a whole lot more. Donna and I were part of a group who worked to get provisions incorporated into law that deal with demand. It became part of the 2005 reauthorization of the Trafficking Witness Protection Act. So, there’s a whole title there that’s meant to address demand for commercial sex in the
It called for a study of unlawful commercial sex acts in
So, it calls for a study–which the Justice Department has not done. It provided funding so that DOJ could provide grants to local law enforcement entities who want to ramp up their efforts to do what they call reverse stings—to arrest men, as opposed to the women. And then it allowed them to use different approaches in terms of punishment. There’s the billboards and car impoundment, the john schools and so on.
It also authorized funding for services to help women exit prostitution, which is really important because it’s just like a revolving door. You have women serially being arrested for prostitution over and over, and it’s just a gigantic burden on the criminal justice systems, and yet we’re not providing any real resources. It’s treating them as the criminal. There are more women arrested than men, as if it doesn’t require two parties. And it’s not recognizing the history of abuse and exploitation and the various problems that are driving many women into prostitution.
Citizen: Has there been enough experience with alternatives like john schools to call them effective?
Thompson: There’s different john schools out there, and I think their effectiveness varies. You’re talking about a day-long effort to try to convince men to change their behavior. I’d rather see that happen than nothing.
Citizen: Do you buy the argument that poverty is a direct cause of prostitution?
Thompson: If you look at the literature, there are different pathways to prostitution. Some of the primary ones are childhood sexual abuse, running away, drug abuse and incarceration. Now, the argument about the childhood sexual abuse dynamic–is it that the childhood sexual abuse is primary? Or is it the fact that leads these children to run away, and then they’re susceptible to being groomed by someone or being picked up by some exploiter who pimps them?
Yes, poverty is a factor. I don’t know that I would lay all of it on the doorstep of welfare reform. But this economic hardship–a mother or another family member in prostitution, an incarcerated parent–many of them have an incarcerated parent.
Citizen: I was shocked as I delved into this how young the average age of entry into prostitution has fallen.
Thompson: I don’t think we have a hard-and-fast estimate there. You will hear different ages from different groups. I’ve heard it as high as 14 and as young as 11. I usually go with 12.
People will say, ‘Oh, wow! That’s terrible.’ But they don’t take the long view and extrapolate that out. That means that the woman you see in prostitution–the 22-year-old, the 23-year-old–was a child in prostitution. Society in general and Christians as well take this hard-line view toward adult women in prostitution: ‘Oh, this is just their choice.’ Or ‘Oh, they’re just bad girls. Oh, they’re just whores. This is who they are.’ We fail to see that if the average age of recruitment into prostitution is 12, that means that by the time she’s 22, she’s spent years, she’s grown up in prostitution.
What else do we expect these women and girls to do? Like what? They turn 18 and suddenly they say, ‘Oh, I’m 18. I’m emancipated now. I’ll see you later, Johnny. I’m outta here. I think I just want to go get my GED today’? I mean, that’s a joke. That’s just not going to happen.
I think we create this very arbitrary line of 18. We say, ‘Oh, you’ve reached the age of majority.’ And that’s very convenient for society because now we can wash our hands of these women and girls. We can just say, ‘Oh, they’re criminals. They’re a nuisance. They’re bad people.’ And we don’t have to deal with them anymore. They’re their own problem.
Citizen: Aren’t we talking about the same principle as statutory rape–someone at that age is not legally able to make an informed decision?
Thompson: Exactly. And that’s the way our law is written. Persons under 18 cannot give meaningful consent to participation in commercial sex acts. Ergo, they are sex-trafficking victims. The problem is that you have all these different state laws concerning the age of consent—for instance, in D.C. it’s 16. So, even if you have a pimp prostituting a girl at 16, the prosecutors are going to have a difficult time arguing that case as sex trafficking.
It just blows my mind that society is so callous that we don’t understand the various types of coercion, the brutality, the psychological abuse that goes into what these pimps do with these women and girls. And you can’t say somehow just because of your age, you’re not a victim.
Citizen: Don’t we as Christians need to help define community standards? Because if we don’t, the world is going to define those standards. As Phil Buress says of pornography, ‘Silence is acceptance.’
Thompson: I know for families out there who are struggling to keep their marriages together and to keep their kids on the right track and get passing grades in school and get their kids through college and pay the bills, it’s time-consuming to deal with these issues. So, I recognize that not everybody can spend their lives fighting sex trafficking and commercial sex and pornography and the tide of smut that’s washing over us.
But at the same time more families need to be engaged in protecting their own kids and teaching their kids–like, ‘hey, it’s not all right to go to a bachelor party.’ You know, ‘Honey, it’s not acceptable to be a stripper’ and ‘No, you can’t wear those pants that have some kind of slogan across your butt.’ There’s all different kinds of ways of being engaged and not having your head in the sand. Because there are kids now trading pornography on their cell phones. How we can say this isn’t going to happen to our kids? Those people are just willfully blind.
So, the church has really got to step up, even if we want just to start with protecting our own kids. And then that is going to have a corollary effect on the rest of the culture if we get aggressive about starting with the kids that we can reach within our own churches and youth groups and camps and so forth.
Citizen: Your organization talks of sex trafficking in terms of ‘abolition.’ How do we get to where we need to go with this?
Thompson: I don’t think there’s any one answer. There’s not a silver bullet. It’s sort of like the buckshot approach. I think the other key thing is for people not to get too overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem–because truly it is immense–but we all have to do our part. And if we all looked at what we could do within our own immediate circle of influence–whether it’s our family, our friends or our community or our job–that there’s probably some areas where we could start pushing back, making little strides here and there if we all did it. If every person was doing it, it would make a huge impact.
For instance, if I’m the only person at my grocery store complaining about a magazine, that’s not going to do a whole lot. I know that there are lots of people from churches who go to the same grocery store that I do, and if we were all complaining, that could certainly make a much larger impact.
We need to have more recognition of these issues within the church. We need to have more sex-addiction treatment programs for those who are struggling with living lives of sexual purity—having programs for them within the church and supporting them, as opposed to ostracizing them or blaming them or treating them like pariahs–recognizing this issue and helping people cope.
Citizen: And we’re not just talking about
Thompson: A year or two ago in
If
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