Pornography Leads to Human Trafficking
An interview with Patrick Trueman, former head of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the U.S. Justice Department
Citizen: Please elaborate on your congressional testimony when you stated that pornography is what fuels the demand for illicit sex. How does that work?
Trueman: One of the most vivid memories in my 20-some years of battling pornography and sexual exploitation is a trip I made to
You could hardly move. It was like the busiest part of
Now, these aren’t kids who just happened to be in the meat market section of
Citizen: The other side has successfully repositioned porn as a free-speech issue with legal protections. Is there any way to reawaken Christian conservatives who have gone to sleep on this issue?
Trueman: The dominant issue for Christians over the last few years has been the defense of marriage, and that’s understandable, but at the same time there’s probably been far, far more damage to the fabric of our culture by pornography and sexual exploitation of women and children, and there has been only a relatively small amount of activity against pornography and little money to battle it.
Citizen: Do you think there’s some battle fatigue and disappointment on this issue that’s set in?
Trueman: Well, there’s some of that going on. I remember early on in the [George W.] Bush administration when I was surprised to find out that [Attorney General John Ashcroft] was not the least bit interested in fighting pornography. That was evident by his actions. We couldn’t motivate Christian leaders to battle him on that. Now, fortunately Citizen magazine ran a cover story on his failure to prosecute. It was a heck of an article. But there wasn’t much else, and when I would talk to Christian leaders, they’d exhibit surprise. They’d say, ‘Oh, he’s a brother in the Lord. How can that be?’
But he set the tone in the Bush administration. [Attorney General] Gonzales didn’t change it, and you’ve got an attorney general now who won’t even meet with the anti-pornography leaders.
If you go back to one statement that Dr.
Now, it’s still a winnable war, and I say that because if you merely started a grand jury against Marriott hotels, they wouldn’t wait until the conclusion of the grand jury, which would surely result in an indictment. They would come in and volunteer to get out of the illegal pornography business. I believe the same is true if you started a grand jury against Verizon or Comcast or the other cable/satellite distributors of illegal pornography. They are not allowed to distribute hard-core pornography, but they do. If the Justice Department would take them on, they’d stop it. If the Justice Department would go after one of the cable stars, like HBO – which regularly features illegal, hard-core pornography – they’d stop. They don’t need that to be profitable. They’re HBO. Same way with Showtime.
If you went after one of the major Internet companies – now wouldn’t you think in the Internet age that the Justice Department would have taken on and convicted one major Internet pornographer? They have not. They’ll argue that they did, and they’ll name it, and you’ve never heard of the company. But they need to take on a big company with a RICO prosecution – i.e., a racketeering prosecution, where you get very substantial fines and jail terms of 20 years, 15 years and forfeiture, where you would take millions away from one of the major Internet pornographers and you would put the fear of God in the others.
And you’d find
Citizen: Could there be a silver lining in the porn industry’s successes making it a big, fat target, like the tobacco industry a few years ago, because of the vast evidence of harm that now can be demonstrated?
Trueman: I think that’s right. They’re making very substantial profits. We had one of the major pornographers that we used as a witness against another pornographer who told us in confidential briefings that for the porn industry there’s as much money exchanged below the table as there is above the table. What we found is that these people were not only engaged in violating federal obscenity laws, they were engaged in money laundering, they were engaged in tax evasion and a string of issues. So, they’re rich targets.
My talk yesterday at the conference was to say it’s laudable that the Justice Department claims to be interested in prosecuting child pornography, but you’ll never solve the child pornography problem – which is a growing problem in
Traders who have a collection that these people want will demand that the person provide original material. That’s how you trade on the Internet. You don’t just go out on the Internet and find child pornography and trade it with an experienced child pornographer because they already have that material. You have to create your own. So, how do they create their own? These men who are addicted to child pornography – who weren’t addicted until they got into the Internet pornography – they molest their children, their children’s friends, their nephews, nieces in order to get original material.
Citizen: Have you seen the shocking figure that between 40 to 80 percent of consumers of child porn go on to molest a child?
Trueman: Well, that’s old news, because we’ve always known that. Now, think about this – I left in ’93, and we were very vigorous on child pornography, and we’d get criticism from judges and from others who would say, ‘Why are you demanding such a high sentence for this guy? He’s only a collector. There’s no evidence that he’s molested.’ And our response was, ‘There’s no such thing as a collector who doesn’t molest.’
So, when you hear figures of 40 to 60, that’s because they’re not – those are inaccurate figures. It’s 100 percent. If they’re collecting child pornography now and they haven’t molested, they’re a new collector. People who are addicted to child pornography are molesters. You can talk to the FBI, the child exploitation people, the Postal Inspection service – the Customs Service used to have a terrific band of men doing this all around the country – they all will tell you the same: Collectors of child pornography are molesters of children.
Citizen: What do you say to the person who doesn’t understand the seriousness of pornography and how it’s part of that seamless fabric of sexual exploitation?
Trueman: You know, I’ve dealt with a lot of predators, a lot of people –they’ll all tell you, they got into pornography and that led them to the strip club. That led them to the prostitute.
I want to put in here the whole issue of human trafficking. In many cities in the country – I’d say any city in the country that’s of any size – there are trafficked victims who are either from this country or from another country, brought into the country or pushed into prostitution by people to fulfill the desires of men. Many of these spas or massage parlors that are listed – they’re really brothels – they cannot fill their staff with people who are volunteering to work in this area. The way they fill it, the way they get their girls, is through human trafficking.
I worked this two-year effort with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called Rescue and Restore, and I was a law enforcement coordinator on this, teaching law enforcement around the country, and I always said law enforcement taught me as much as I taught them because I would go out to Atlanta, to Phoenix, to many other cities and just talk to the vice cops about what they see. Now, they never understood it as human trafficking back then.
They’d go in and raid [the massage parlors] one day, bring the girls down to the police department, book them, set court dates. They never showed up for the court date. If they’d go back to the same business a week later, it would be all different people. And they noticed the same thing in
If you go on the streets of
So, where do these men come from that are using those trafficked women? It’s the same thing. They get into pornography, they get into sex, they get into using trafficked women. You don’t just start out in pornography and you’re not affected. You are affected. And people will go to great lengths because this is a mental health issue. Pornography is a mental health issue, and the consequences are – you spiral out of control, and it’s devastating.
Citizen: What would be a good avenue to pursue in an interview with Ernie Allen?
Trueman: Well, I would ask Ernie about this same phenomenon of men getting involved in pornography and then what percentage of them gravitate to child pornography because there is a progression, and he’s talked about it. They started keeping track on their statistics here a couple of years ago of not only complaints about child pornography, but on adult pornography sent to children. People can file those complaints on the cyber-tipline also.
And they see that as a growing problem. It’s a form of child abuse to make hard-core pornography available to children. I don’t think a lot of people realize that, but it’s certainly something that we’re all aware of because we’ve been doing it so long.
What happens with these fourth and fifth graders seeing it on the Internet, and you get kids who are talking about it on the playground – they’ll print out a picture, they have these flash drives. You know, you have a phenomenon now in this pornography culture that we’ve developed of boys and girls in high school and grade school sending text messages with pictures – picture messages. They’ll take sexually explicit pictures of themselves and send it to a boy.
Now, how did they get to that? That’s not a natural phenomenon. That doesn’t occur naturally. Girls didn’t use to do that. What it is, is – led by the boys, where they joke about pornography, they’ve seen it so much – they gain a sense of entitlement to the girls. ‘I’m entitled to see you naked, and if you won’t give that to me, your friend so-and-so will give that to me. I see girls your age all the time on the Internet. Why don’t you send me a picture of you?’ And there’s a great pressure that builds up on girls. It’s a subtle pressure, and they play into it to the point where they adopt the male behavior. That’s a phenomenon we didn’t use to see.
When I was at the Justice Department – I admit it’s been a few years now, 15 – we used to say women aren’t interested in pornography. Because when you would look at the pornography shots, how much of it was material that would be attractive to women? And the pornography that was out there was always demeaning to the woman. Well, now you have a significant percentage of women who get addicted to pornography – pornography that’s created for them. What you’ve got is women and girls – young girls – adopting male-like behavior.
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