Reaching the Point of Anger: Pornography and Sex Trafficking in America
An interview with Dr. Barrett Duke, vice president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
Citizen magazine conducted this interview in May 2008.
Citizen: Address the ‘seamless fabric’ argument–and why we might need to be more concerned about pornography than we are as a society.
Duke: In a lot of ways pornography is the gateway to most of the sexual deviancy that we’re seeing in this country. You’ll have a hard time finding any police officer who has been on the scene of a crime involving some kind of sex-related activity who won’t also say that pornography was involved in some kind of way. Oftentimes pornography is the starting point for some of the most violent and aggressive forms of sexual attacks on other people.
We see even what’s considered ‘soft porn’ as the first step for men, especially, who have become addicted to pornography and beyond that. It isn’t as though they just wake up one day and say, ‘I just want to see some of the worst forms of sexual deviancy I possibly can.’ They start off by just dabbling a little bit and dealing with what’s considered soft porn. And after a while, that no longer satisfies their desire for whatever part of the brain that’s affected. They desire something even more degrading and oftentimes more violent. They move through this series of progressions. Usually somewhere at the beginning of that is a Playboy magazine or a Penthouse magazine or something like that.
Oftentimes when you find women who are in prostitution, many of those women were sexually abused as children, and oftentimes you’ll find that whoever engaged in that sexual abuse was themselves influenced by pornography. So, yes, I think it’s right to say that there is a seamless garment here, where pornography is simply a starting point for so many of these other sexual problems that we have in this country.
Citizen: The players themselves don’t seem to follow these artificial distinctions–the porn stars are largely the same people in stripping and prostitution.
Duke: You will find if you look at the progression of women who begin in the pornography industry–maybe they’ll start out in the strip clubs or something like that, and they stay there for a while. But as they move further along in this sexual exploitation timeline, they move as they become older and of less interest, they end up moving into some of the other more degrading forms of sexual exploitation.
Part of it’s because they’re taking drugs and they’re drinking alcohol constantly simply to numb their consciences at what they’re doing in the strip clubs, but then their lives are deteriorating. They end up in drug addictions and alcoholism, and they don’t know any other way to continue to live except to continue to allow people to exploit them sexually, and they end up eventually in some of the most degrading forms of sexual exploitation anybody could possibly imagine.
And in this country we’re allowing this to happen to these young girls. And then we hear this argument, ‘Well, they chose it. We can’t make it illegal–we can’t prosecute people for helping girls who choose this lifestyle.’ Whereas most of the time you find those women may have thought they would try it, find themselves enslaved, find themselves trapped in lives that they cannot get out of.
This is far beyond anything of a voluntary nature. Not to mention the fact that most of the women who do go into pornography themselves were sexually abused as children, which automatically predisposed them to more sexual abuse later in life.
Citizen: You and Tom Minnery and Phil Burress met with Marriott Hotel officials recently, asking them to discontinue in-room cable TV porn. How did that go?
Duke: We did feel like they were very open to our concerns. They recognized that they are trying to present themselves as a family-friendly hotel chain, and we pointed out to them the inconsistency of offering pornography–in fact, pumping it into the room–and still calling themselves family-friendly. I felt like it was a good first meeting. We did come to an understanding of a couple of things that the Marriott folks would take back as good first steps toward helping Marriott live up to their image as a family-friendly organization.
Citizen: Isn’t in-room hotel porn a huge snare for men, especially traveling businessmen, who might not otherwise engage in this behavior at home?
Duke: Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening. These hotels are making it easy for them. They bill them in innocuous ways so that nobody could look at their hotel receipts and even know that they’d been looking at pornography. They just put it right there at their fingertips. They just need to click one thing or a couple things on their remote, and there it is. And most men are visually driven, and a certain number of them are going to be trapped by that.
Hotels should take greater responsibility for what happens to their guests. And one way they can deal with that, which is what we talked to the Marriott folks about, was instead of having this opt-out process in the room, make it happen at the desk so that the pornography is turned off to all the rooms and you actually have to ask at the desk to have the pornography turned on. I think that would eliminate a lot of the problem that men are facing. When they’re in these hotel rooms, they’re all by themselves, there’s no one looking over their shoulders, and they’re feeling lonely.
The argument we heard was ‘We’re just providing services to our guests. They ask for a service; we provide it.’ Well, they don’t provide all services to their guests. Even at their Marriott in
Citizen: What can be done legislatively about the porn epidemic?
Duke: At this point it’s hard to get anybody in Congress to do anything on it because they’re all afraid that the Supreme Court–or some court–is simply going to tell them they’re violating fee-speech issues. So, it’s hard even to get anybody really to get serious about legislation at this point because of the courts. We’ve tried to address the situation with the courts. We’ve weighed in on their insane ruling that pictures–drawings of naked children or computer-generated images of naked children–aren’t the equivalent of child pornography, which has really muddied the waters at this point.
Citizen: If the legal definition of obscenity is a function of ‘community standards,’ shouldn’t that suggest something for citizen activism? Isn’t that all the more reason for us to speak up at the grassroots level and enforce those standards?
Duke: Well, that’s right. What is helpful with this issue is that it’s not only a Christian issue. There are many people in our communities who know exactly what pornography is when they see it, who know exactly what obscenity is when they see it or hear it. It ought to be easy to create large, broad coalitions in the communities to address these problems and then create a national movement that will actually influence the way this is addressed at the federal level also.
But so far, I guess we just haven’t seen the level of frustration or the level of–maybe we need to get to the point of anger. When enough mothers, especially, and enough wives have seen more than enough destruction of their children and their husbands that they create a national movement like we have with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And I think that will help a lot.
I think there are already tens of thousands of men who already know how destructive this is and who know that they need to keep it out of their lives and out of their families’ lives and out of their children’s lives. But somebody just needs to come along and find a way to organize in those communities and then create a national movement out of those community organizations. But I believe we are close to that time because so many people’s lives are just being destroyed by this.
Citizen: Should our churches be more involved, even take a leadership role in this issue?
Duke: They have to come to the point of saying that while it’s unpleasant to talk about, the only person not talking about it is the pastor. Most of the people in the pews are talking about it, a lot. And it’s time for pastors to start calling sin ‘sin,’ start calling pornography ‘sin’ and start developing programs in churches that can help especially the men, but not only the men–women are also being caught up more and more in pornography–and begin to provide help groups, counseling and other kinds of services to help make people aware of sexual addiction and help them come out of sexual addiction. And it’s time that churches begin to give true leadership from the pulpit as well as in their ministries to help folks–and communities–begin to combat this.
Citizen: Do you see a silver lining here, in that the sex industry has so overplayed its hand that now we can prove they really are endangering our children to the extent there finally could be a significant backlash–as with the tobacco industry a few years ago?
Duke: I certainly do. With tobacco, so many people had finally lost loved ones and communities were finally tired of burying loved ones and looking at the tremendous toll that tobacco was taking on the people’s health that there was a backlash. And we could very well be at the beginning stages of a backlash on pornography now as so many families are being destroyed by pornography that eventually the good people in this country are going to say ‘we’ve had enough.’ And when they’ve had enough, they can make changes.
But it will take the good people of this country finally to say they’ve had enough because the pornographers and their enablers are not simply going to say ‘we’ve gone as far as we want to go’ until this entire country is awash in pornography and sexual deviation. And the rest of us need to make sure that doesn’t happen. So, yes, we could be finally seeing the beginning of a backlash that sends them back into the shadows. We can certainly pray for that.
Citizen: How can we hasten that day?
Duke: When the good people in this country decide they no longer want it coming into their homes, and they begin to insist that the cable companies no longer be able to simply charge them to send it into everyone’s homes. When we’re actually able to have an a la carte cable system, where people can choose which channels people want to pay for instead of having to pay for bundles. That will help.
When people begin to tell their stores that they no longer want to have the pornographic magazines out on display and begin to tell store owners that while they may not be able to stop them from selling the magazine, they’re going to stop shopping in those stores if those magazines aren’t put behind the counter out of sight. We know, as a matter of fact, that when these stores put the magazines out of sight, the sales drop off almost completely. It’s going to take those kinds of things.
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