If you don’t think that slavery is happening in your own backyard, check out slaverymap.org. You’ll be surprised at the number of cases in your state. And these are only the cases that have been released.
Many more go on unnoticed, undocumented and dismissed every day.
Today in the prayer room, during a weekly prayer meeting for human trafficking, a prophetic singer delivered a spoken-word song about the zeal of Jesus and the ending of human trafficking. The rap begins at 1:12:50 continues for about 15 minutes. Check that out Anti-Trafficking Hip Hop (Time 1:12:50).
This is just another example of how God is calling forth Intercessory-Abolitionists from every area of life– the arts, media, government, the chruch, etc. Before long an army of men and women, marked for the cause of God’s justice being realized on the earth, will lay down their lives for the poor. They will live lifestyles abandoned to serve the poor through their vocation, whether public office, or law, or medicine, or accounting, or journalism just to name a few fields.
Of particular interest are musicians and singers. Music has always steered culture. Not only is God putting HIs message in the hearts and mouths of artists who will speak out in new ways against modern-day slavery, but these new expressions of the message will reach ears that are out of range for politicians and preachers alike. When a few voices sing the songs of deliverance, a generation will rise up and follow, and when that happens, a culture of worship and intercession will emerge where a generation begins to actually sing their prayers. They’ll sing lyrics while they’re in their cars, while they’re at the office, even as they exercise. And whether they know it or not, they will be crying out to heaven on behalf of the weak. And heaven will answer their cries.
Repost from Exodus Cry
The world will be watching, but what won’t they see?
The FIFA World Cup tournament is the most widely viewed sporting event in the world. FIFA is composed of over 200 nations, 32 of which have qualified for the chance to compete in the month long tournament in South Africa. But there is a darker side to this event—the demand for sex. Experts estimate that as many as 40,000 women and children will be trafficked into South Africa for the World Cup.
Exodus Cry is committed to the abolition of modern-day slavery, a work that is central to the heart of Jesus Christ. We have been praying and preparing for many months for the upcoming moment when South Africa would be placed on the world stage and its women and children on the auctioning block that is the modern day sex-trade. As part of the body of Christ, looking to the King of Glory, Jesus Christ, we see his mission in Luke 4:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
Jesus was commissioned by his Father to pursue the broken, oppressed, and enslaved with open arms of love and an offering of freedom. As Christ lives in us, we too, are anointed unto this work. Exodus Cry, in order to be the answer to our own prayers for the freedom and deliverance of Jesus Christ to be manifested in the streets of South Africa, is sending a team of intercessory abolitionists to contend, with boots on the ground, for an Isaiah 64 breaking-in of the Lord. This team will be partnering with the local prayer movement in cities across South Africa to intercede for speedy justice on behalf of the oppressed, raising awareness among fans on the realities of human trafficking, and reaching out to women in prostitution and sexual exploitation with the compassion and love of Jesus Christ that transforms and restores. Read More.
June 1, 2010
Prostitution has been called the world’s oldest profession. That can’t be right. Before those who today are sometimes euphemistically called “sex workers” come all the pimps and traffickers who exploit them.
Despite the occasional glittering portrayals of “high-class” call girls turning tricks for fun and profit, the life of boys, girls, and women trapped in the sex trade is often nasty, brutish, and short. As always, most are not there by choice but have been lured into an especially dehumanizing form of slavery by false promises of a good job and a better life.
Ugly stories of sex trafficking originating in eastern Europe and Asia abound in our media. Safely in this country, we shudder and quickly turn the page or click on the next link, thankful at least that this expression of human sin is not an American problem. But in this we are wrong. Read full article.
Host, Dan Rather Reports
Pornland, Oregon: Child Prostitution in Portland Child prostitution has become a national problem in this country. Yes, I know that you have trouble believing that. You don’t want to believe it, so you tend not to.
“Widespread sex trafficking in children?”, you may be saying to yourself. “Sure, it happens overseas in places like Thailand and Moldova, and while there may be some of it here there’s not that much of it in our country.”
Based on a months long investigation and some reportorial digging, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. We all are. We’re in denial.
In covering news for more than 60 years, I’d like to think that few stories shock me anymore. But this is one of them. We ran across it late last year and the more we dug, the more disturbing it became.
Eighty-year-old men paying a premium to violate teenage girls, sometimes supplied by former drug gangs now into child sex trafficking big time? You’ve got to be kidding. Nope. That’s happening and a lot more along the same lines.
The business is booming. One of the worst areas for it runs along lines running roughly from Seattle to Portland, to San Francisco and Los Angeles, to Las Vegas. But no place in the country is immune.
To pick just one example among many, Portland, Oregon is without doubt one of the nation’s treasures. It has been voted one of the best places to live and work. But according to police, the city and its outlying communities has become a hub for the sexual exploitation of children. In a recent nationwide sting by Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, Portland ranked second in the country for the number of rescued child prostitutes. And according to Doug Justus, the workhorse sergeant in charge of Portland’s tiny Vice Detail, many of the children caught up in this are middle class kids from the area.
The girls, sometimes as young as 12, often 13-16, are lured by a “front man” in his mid-to-late teens. He becomes her “boyfriend,” taking her to dinner, buying her nice things, sometimes meeting her parents. The girl eventually moves in with him. Then he says they need money to continue being together. First, she’s enticed to sleep with his friends to pay the rent. Soon she’s turning tricks for what police say is an endless supply of older men willing to pay top money for sex with very young girls. Other times convincing the young adolescent girls to sell themselves happens very quickly.
“It is an out-of-control problem. It’s unbelievable,” say Justus. “I’ve only done this vice-squad job for three years. I’ve been a cop for 29. If you had told me three years ago that a 14-year-old girl would go to a food court, meet a guy, and three hours later be selling herself, I’d a said, no frigging way. It happens every single day, every day.”
It is a very lucrative business, according to Justus. “An average pimp with one kid will make between $800 and $l,000 a day. That’s seven days a week, 30 days a month,” he said. And the pimps usually have a stable of young girls. No wonder so many criminals in the drug trade have turned to it which they have in droves. There’s less chance of being caught, less chance of being prosecuted if caught, lighter sentences — if any — if convicted.
There is, and has been for a long time, a national “War on Drugs.” There isn’t one on child prostitution and what amounts to a slave trade. Only feeble efforts at best.
Justus is frustrated that the Portland police have only two full-time vice investigators, compared to dozens of drug investigators.
“I’m not a politician. I’m just a cop. But if I’m a criminal and I got busted for drugs and I had a regional (drug) task force over here. And there’s another task force over there, and there, and then I know there’s only two vice investigators in the city of Portland, let me think. I think I’ll sell women because what are the chances of me being caught?”
The story we’ve prepared is not about prostitution per se. This is about child abuse. This is also about statutory rape and compelling prostitution among the young. All are difficult to prove. A major reason, according to police, is that it’s extremely difficult to convince a young girl to testify against their pimps and “johns”. They are afraid.
Sgt. Justus told us the story of a 16-year-old girl whom he convinced to “roll” on her pimp. But before she could testify against him she disappeared — and her pimp walked free. Justus has spent the last year looking for her and fears she’s dead.
How many children are being peddled on the streets of Portland and in other cities and towns, to say nothing of the Internet (Justus and other law enforcement people say Craigslist, along with other Internet sites, are major factors in the spread of child prostitution)? Hard to know about the real numbers. The most conservative estimates are that at least 100,000 American children are being victimized. Many experts say they believe it’s closer to 300,000 or more.
Whatever the number, it is a national outrage and disgrace. And the problem is growing, not diminishing.
Based on our investigation, we’ve prepared an hour long program on this problem. We’ve spoken with parents who never dreamed their young daughter would be caught up in underage prostitution but was. We’ve also interviewed several girls who lived to tell about their experiences of being sold. Tuesday night at 8pm Eastern time on HDNet, via satellite and cable. Dan Rather
By Alex Tresniowski
Hundreds of Girls Are Being Forced to Work as Prostitutes at Truck Stops Across the Country. How Is This Happening? SUMMER, 13, WAS FOR SALE FOR $40. A BUBBLY, PONYTAILED GIRL FROM OKLAHOMA CITY, FOND OF VOLLEYBALL AND SPONGEBOB SquarePants, she found herself far from home and stranded at a truck stop along Texas’s Interstate 40 on a chilly January night three years ago. In jeans and T-shirt, she walked to a strip of tarmac where several 18-wheelers were parked—an area known as “Party Row”—and waited for a trucker to flash his headlights. When one did, Summer pulled herself into the cab of his rig and, as the trucker casually watched a small TV, turned her first trick. “I was scared,” she says, now 15, recalling the first of hundreds of forced encounters with truckers two or three times her age. “I didn’t know how to get out of it. So I thought, ‘Just do it, and don’t cause problems.'”
Summer (not her real name) has decided to tell her story to shine light on a shameful crime—the sex trafficking of minors in the U.S. Investigators say there are likely hundreds of underage girls like Summer who have been lured to work as prostitutes in truck stops in Oklahoma, Washington, California and other states. “This isn’t something that’s happening on a distant shore, it’s happening right in our communities,” says Robert McCampbell, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma. “A family pulling into one of these truck stops wouldn’t know this is going on. The truth is it’s happening everywhere.”
Last December, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that more than 500 people have been arrested on child prostitution-related charges—and more than 200 children rescued—since a large-scale federal investigation called Innocence Lost began in 2003. A similar FBI sting operation in Oklahoma, code-named Stormy Nights, has so far resulted in the conviction of 14 traffickers, their victims mostly between the ages of 12 and 17. While the vast majority of truckers aren’t involved in child prostitution, those who are often don’t care how young the girls are, says Oklahoma City vice-squad investigator Ben Lacaze: “They know when a girl is 13 versus 20; these girls still talk about the same silly stuff most teenagers talk about.” Adds Mike Beaver, an FBI special agent who has worked on Stormy Nights since 2003, both “the pimps and the johns are looking for the young ones because they’re easily manipulated.”
Summer’s story shows just how easily a young girl can slip through the cracks. One of three daughters raised in an Oklahoma City suburb by Cindy, a school custodian, and Dennis, a handyman, she was 11 when she began using drugs. Then her father fell ill with cancer. “I felt confused and guilty,” she says. “I thought I was the reason he was sick, because I was doing drugs.” At 13, now with a methamphetamine habit, Summer dropped out of school. One afternoon, a man in his early 20s pulled alongside her in a car and asked if she’d like to go to a party. The girl in the passenger seat “looked around my age and was really pretty,” says Summer. Once in the car, the pair offered Summer marijuana and alcohol. She didn’t even notice that the man had driven over the state line into Texas. “That’s when he said, ‘We’re gonna get a motel and she’s going to take you out to a truck stop and you’re going to get me some money,'” Summer recalls. “Once we found that first truck, I was on my own.”
Prostitution is an open secret among the nomads of America’s highways. Truck stops provide the perfect cover for young prostitutes, who sometimes solicit customers over CB radios (“commercial” is a favored code word for paid sex). With the pimps out of view in nearby motels, the girls cruise the dozens of rigs lined up in sprawling lots set away from the general parking. “You see the girls going from truck to truck,” says Steven Maldonado, 48, a St. Louis-based trucker who prefers to park at rest areas to avoid the hassle of truck stop prostitutes. “I’ve had them knock on my door every 20 minutes when I’m trying to sleep for the night.” When police or security hired by truck stop operators clamp down, the pimps simply move down the interstate.
Their victims have one thing in common: vulnerability. “We don’t have happy, well-adjusted girls who end up doing this,” says Robert McCampbell. “If no one gives you love or attention, the pimp starts looking pretty good.”
Lisa was a 15-year-old sophomore at a Wichita, Kans., high school when a friend asked her if she wanted to meet Bobby Prince Jr., a handsome star of the school’s football and track teams. “He was the most popular guy in school,” says Lisa. She agreed to go on a day trip with him to Oklahoma City—and soon found herself in a car with his father, Bobby Prince Sr. “He said, ‘I’m a pimp, and you’re my ‘ho and you’re going to make me money,'” remembers Lisa, now 18. “My heart just sank. I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t even cry.”
Lisa spent the next four months working as a truck stop prostitute. When people ask her why she didn’t just jump out of the car or run away, “I try to explain to them that it’s not that easy. The guys have so much control over your mind. They scare you. They say things like, ‘If you leave, I’ll kill you and your family.'”
Caught in an FBI raid in 2004, both Princes pleaded guilty to sex-trafficking. FBI Special Agent Beaver testified at their detention hearing about how the younger Prince threatened the girls with a gun while his father once found another of their girls at a movie theater and choked her before dragging her across a parking lot to a car. Prince Sr. was sentenced to 12 ½ years in prison; Prince Jr. received five years and 10 months.
Jennifer, 19, remembers her first day on the streets. At 13 she began working to earn money for her family as a maid at a hotel, where an older coworker “told me she knew a great way to make money and everybody was doing it,” says Jennifer. “She didn’t specifically tell me what I’d be doing until her son brought me into the city.” Later that day she was taken to a truck stop and handed baby wipes and condoms. “I was terrified,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do or what to say. I didn’t talk, I just did as I was told.” In the cab of a truck she had sex with a man in his 50s “who was fat and stunk,” says Jennifer. “He told me how beautiful I was and tipped me an extra $20 [because it was my first time].” She says she was able to have sex with truckers over the next three months because “afterwards, what you did kind of goes away. You put it in the back of your mind and it stays locked there until you let it out.”
Jennifer says she had sex with as many as 15 truckers a night, charging from $40 to $80 each. The girls hand all the money to a lead prostitute, who gives it to the pimp. In exchange the pimp pays for room and board and occasional perks. “You get to get your nails done, go tanning, get your hair done,” says Linlee, 18, an Oklahoma City native who became a truck stop prostitute at 12. “I went shopping every day. That’s why a lot of younger girls fall into it.” At the same time the pimps don’t allow the girls to make phone calls or leave the motels where they typically house them without supervision. “If I even talked about leaving, there would be a fight,” says Linlee. Most pimps beat their girls; some tattoo them as a way of branding them, says the FBI’s Beaver. “The girls are absolutely brainwashed. This is a business. It’s not Pretty Woman.”
Escaping from enforced prostitution can appear impossible. Pimps often tell the girls they’ve committed a crime, so going to the police is useless, or that their “families will reject them once they find out what they’ve been doing,” says McCampbell, the former U.S. attorney. Lisa kept working as a prostitute even after the Princes were arrested. Finally the FBI pulled her off the streets and put her in a juvenile facility. Free of her drug habit and out of the business for the past two years, she now lives with her mother and has earned a GED. Linlee, too, is off the streets and living with her father; she, too, earned her GED. Still, her past haunts her. “I have a recurring dream where I’m walking with this girl and we’re going to this big shed and there’s a whole lot of guys in there,” says Linlee. “I get pushed in, and that’s it.”
Summer’s mother, Cindy, reported her daughter missing to police after Summer disappeared from the family house in January 2003. Although police investigated her as a runaway, it was up to Summer herself to escape from her keepers. Defying her pimp’s orders when she was arrested in a sting, she gave police her real name and age and begged them to call her mother. Back at home, though, her life was still chaotic: Her father had died, and she was arrested for breaking into a home to get money to buy drugs. But seven months in a group home seems to have helped her get back on track. She works at a local fast-food restaurant, tending the front counter and the drive-through window. Her feet hurt after every shift, but, she says with a smile, “I’m making money legally.” Looking back, what surprises her most about her ordeal “is that I made it out alive,” she says. “I took so many turns and turns. I think I’m finally going down the right road. I was a victim, but I overcame that. Now I’ve become a survivor.”
Contributors: Darla Atlas/Oklahoma City,
Ellen Shapiro/New York City. More From
This Article Highways to Hell Networks of pimps operate in more than 12 cities, recruiting minors and shipping them across state lines on major highways (right). “The further they get them away from their support system,” says an ex-U.S. attorney, “the more control they have over them.”
Who Can Help? For information or to report suspicious activity, contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (1-800-THE LOST), the FBI (www.fbi.gov) or local law enforcement
Campaigner’s warning as first cases of men being trafficked into Scotland as sex slaves are revealed Apr 13 2010 By Annie Brown http://globalgrind.com/channel/news/content/1519101/African-Men-Being-Trafficked-As-Sex-Slaves/ MEN have been trafficked into Scotland to be used as gay sex slaves. In the first known cases of male sex trafficking to hit Scotland, two men were smuggled in from Africa and imprisoned in flats. The men were victims of separate incidents. One was forced to take part in pornography, while the other was sold for sex. Experts fear that more victims could follow. Julian Heng, who manages a support project for male prostitutes, said his organisation were called in to help the men. He said: “We have had a couple of requests for telephone support for professionals who were supporting two separate cases of men who had been trafficked into the country. “They weren’t asylum seekers or refugees, they had actually been trafficked into Scotland from Africa.” There are around 700 trafficked women in the UK but when men are trafficked here, it tends to be for manual labour – not sex. Mr Heng, who is service manager of NHS Open Road, said the male sex trade often mirrored what happened to women. He said: “Whatever happens with women involved in prostitution, we will usually see happening with men. It tends to take a couple of years, that’s all. “So just like we are aware of women being trafficked into Scotland for prostitution, I think we need to be aware that it will happen more with men. “It is something we are going to have to be vigilant about. It is very much a new feature in Scotland but it is something that will happen here.” Both the men were in their twenties and were held captive in properties in Glasgow. Both thought they were here to work but were forced into sex acts. In the first case a year ago, the young man who had been brought in for pornography managed to escape. He was desperate to go home and was flown back. The second case was within the last three months. Sex traffickers frequently subject victims to debt bondage – telling them they owe money for living expenses and transport and have to sell sex to repay the debt. They condition their victims using starvation, confinement, beatings and rape or threats of violence to their families. In Scotland, there were about 400 male escort listings on the web in 2008 and half were in the Greater Glasgow area. There are around 100 men who work the streets. Some perform full sex for as little as £10. Mr Heng said: “There is a Pretty Woman myth that it will be glamorous and well paid. The reality is grim and the majority of men are earning a pittance.” They will often have regular punters, which some of the men see as better the devil they know. Contact is often made on mobile phones and the internet, where the pimp will be the gatekeeper. Mr Heng said there was an even greater stigma attached to the men who were prostitutes. He said: “It is seen by some as acceptable for men to purchase sex from women but largely unacceptable for men to buy sex from other men.” Yet the male and female prostitutes often have the same clients. The punter isn’t necessarily looking for unusual sex but the added power kick of brutality. Like the men who buy from women, the punters are married with kids in most cases. Mr Heng said: “It is not about the type of sex, it is about a power dynamic of being able to buy sex. You can call all the shots and it is often very aggressive.” Open Road offer counselling, access to sexual health services and support to the men to help them get out of prostitution. Half of the male prostitutes working in Glasgow are actually straight despite their services always being bought by men. Most are homeless and the idea that male prostitutes are gay men extending their sex life is a myth. Having been sexually abused as a child is a common denominator. Mr Heng said: “The core harm that messes with their head is they have to perform unwanted sex. “That sex is no more wanted by the gay men who are prostitutes than the heterosexual men. The shame aspect for both is huge. “That is why there is no way of making prostitution safe. It doesn’t work. You can’t stop the physical or psychological harm.” The Open Road project, which has been going for three years, sees males from their late teens to their fifties. Most are in their twenties. Mr Heng is on the consultation group for the End Prostitution Now campaign to ban the purchase of sex in Scotland. The nation has taken some steps to tackle street prostitution and has made buying sex in a public place an offence. But men who buy sex indoors are committing no offence and that is flourishing. Advertising for sexual services is now at an overwhelming level in newspapers, magazines, on TV and through the internet. In Sweden, the prostitutes have been decriminal ised but the punters get punished. The number of punters has dropped by 80 per cent and the number of women work ing Stockholm’s streets has fallen from 2500 to 100 in 10 years. And sex trafficking there has dropped to 200 women a year, while neighbouring Finland had 15,000. To support the ban, click here
By LEVI PULKKINEN
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/417564_child29.html
March 29, 2010
A man and woman accused of abducting and pimping a University Place teen have been charged with child prostitution.
Behind bars since their arrests by Kent police Wednesday, Tory R. Hayes and Iesha R. Young are accused of luring the 17-year-old to a hotel and forcing her to “walk the track” on Pacific Highway South. According to charging documents, Young and Hayes threatened to harm the girl or her family during the day they held her against her will.
Speaking with detectives, the girl said Young approached her on March 12 at a Tacoma hotel. The girl told officers she was trying to get in touch with her mother at the time, and asked Young for help.
Young and the girl stayed up much of that Friday night discussing the hair salon Young claimed to operate.
“Iesha (Young) befriended (the girl) and the two talked quite a bit,” a Kent detective said in charging documents.
Before driving the girl home, Young offered her a job at the salon, according to charging documents. The prospect excited the girl, who was looking for work to help with her mother’s rent.
The girl contacted Young days later about the job offer, and was picked up by Young and a man. Rather than drive her to a SeaTac salon described by Young, though, the pair took the girl to a Kent hotel.
At the hotel, the girl saw a change in Young and Hayes, according to charging documents. Hayes told the teen she could make him “a lot of money.”
“You’re not going home tonight,” the 40-year-old Tacoma resident allegedly told the girl. “You’re gonna make me money.”
Young, 24, allegedly threatened to shock the girl with a Taser if she did not comply, and both reminded the girl they knew where she lived, according to charging documents.
Hayes drove Young and the girl to “the track” on Pacific Highway South, where Young supervised the girl as they solicited “johns,” prosecutors allege. During the night and the following day, March 18, Young found several men willing to pay for sex with the teen.
Investigators claim Young and Hayes forced the girl to take cocaine several times during the ordeal. They also allege Young and Hayes discussed taking the girl to Georgia.
At 11 p.m. on March 18, the pair took the girl to a Tacoma bar where Hayes allegedly instructed both females to solicit sex.
Seeing a chance to break free, the girl asked a bartender for help. As she did so, prosecutors allege Young and Hayes tried to drag her from the bar; a woman there ultimately gave her a ride home, where her mother called the police.
Having collected hotel records supporting the girl’s story, Kent police arrested Hayes and Young. According to police statements, Young attempted to blame the events on Hayes.
“I didn’t do none of this,” she allegedly told police. “(She) was here, but he did it all.”
Speaking with detectives, the girl said she felt “the emotional scarring she endured would last for the rest of her life,” the Kent detective told the court.
“She informed me that she felt angry and hurt by what Tory and Iesha did to her,” the detective said in court documents. “She also told me she wanted them to be held accountable so they wouldn’t hurt any other young girls like they hurt her.”
Both Hayes and Young remain jailed at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. Each has been charged with commercial sexual abuse of a minor, a felony.
Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com.
March 31, 2010 4:00 A.M.
Getting Serious About Pornography
It is ravaging American families.
http://article.nationalreview.com/429884/getting-serious-about-pornography/anonymous
Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by distorting a mans perception of his wife. Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue $97 billion worldwide in 2006 than all of the leading technology companies combined. Consider a narcotic so insidious that it evades serious scientific study and legislative action for decades, thriving instead under the ever-expanding banner of the First Amendment.
According to an online statistics firm, an estimated 40 million people use this drug on a regular basis. It doesnt come in pill form. It cant be smoked, injected, or snorted. And yet neurological data suggest its effects on the brain are strikingly similar to those of synthetic drugs. Indeed, two authorities on the neurochemistry of addiction, Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth, claim it is the ability of this drug to influence all three pleasure systems in the brain arousal, satiation, and fantasy that makes it the pièce de résistance among the addictions.
Earlier this month, the Witherspoon Institute released a report examining The Social Costs of Pornography, signed by more than 50 scholars representing a wide array of professions, academic disciplines, and political views. The report details the considerable social costs that pornography exacts upon men, women, and children.
The findings of the report hit particularly close to home for me. By his own account, my husband of 13 years and high-school sweetheart, was first exposed to pornography around age ten. He viewed it regularly during high school and college and, although he tried hard to stop, continued to do so throughout the course of our marriage. For the past few years he had taken to sleeping in the basement, distancing himself from me, emotionally and physically. Recently he began to reject my sexual advances outright, claiming he just didnt feel love for me like he used to, and lamenting that he thought of me more as the mother of our children than as a sexual partner.
Then one morning around 2am he called, intoxicated, from his office to announce that he had developed feelings for someone new. The woman he became involved with was an unemployed alcoholic with all the physical qualities of a porn star bleached blond hair, heavy makeup, provocative clothing, and large breasts. After the revelation, my husband tried to break off his relationship with this woman. But his remorse was short-lived. Within a few months he had moved permanently out of the home he shared with me and our five young children. In retrospect, I believe he succumbed to the allure of the secret fantasy life he had been indulging since his adolescence.
My husband is not alone. According to Dr. Victor Cline, a nationally renowned clinical psychologist who specializes in sexual addiction, pornography addiction is a process that undergoes four phases. First, addiction, resulting from early and repeated exposure accompanied by masturbation. Second, escalation, during which the addict requires more frequent porn exposure to achieve the same highs and may learn to prefer porn to sexual intercourse. Third, desensitization, during which the addict views as normal what was once considered repulsive or immoral. And finally, the acting-out phase, during which the addict runs an increased risk of making the leap from screen to real life.
This behavior may manifest itself in the form of promiscuity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, group sex, rape, sadomasochism, or even child molestation. The final phase may also be characterized by one or more extramarital affairs. A 2004 study published in Social Science Quarterly found that Internet users who had had an extramarital affair were 3.18 times more likely to have used online porn than Internet users who had not had an affair. Among other things, the Witherspoon report is a stern warning to all married women to take seriously the signs of a sexual addiction, before it is too late.
Perhaps the greatest hardship for women who fear they have lost (or are losing) a husband to Internet porn is the absence of a public consensus about the harmful effects of pornography on marriage. Consider what we know. In a study published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, Schneider found that among the 68 percent of couples in which one person was addicted to Internet porn, one or both had lost interest in sex. Results of the same study, published in 2000, indicated that porn use was a major contributing factor to increased risk of separation and divorce. This finding is substantiated by results of a 2002 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, during which surveyed lawyers claimed that an obsessive interest in Internet pornography was a significant factor in 56 percent of their divorce cases the prior year.
Porn use creates the impression that aberrant sexual practices are more common than they really are, and that promiscuous behavior is normal. For example, in a 2000 meta-analysis of 46 published studies put out by the National Foundation for Family Research and Education at the University of Calgary, regular exposure to pornography increased risk of sexual deviancy (including lower age of first intercourse and excessive masturbation), increased belief in the rape myth (that women cause rape and rapists are normal), and was associated with negative attitudes regarding intimate relationships (e.g., rejecting the need for courtship and viewing persons as sexual objects). Indeed, neurological imaging confirms the latter finding. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans to analyze the brain activity of men viewing pornography. She found that after viewing porn, men looked at women more as objects than as human beings.
The social implications of these data are significant, but we need to know more. The American Psychiatric Association is likely to add pornography addiction to their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual this year. Congress should fund a long-term, multidisciplinary analysis of the effects of porn addiction on marriage and family life. The National Institutes of Health are granted billions of taxpayer dollars for research on a wide variety of public-health problems, and yet pornography addiction is not among them. Most health-insurance companies provide little to no coverage for treatment of this problem, and the health-care legislation signed into law last week promises more of the same. The fact is that the moral and financial needs of couples struggling with this form of addiction will remain unaddressed in a country that views pornography use as a constitutional right.
I will never know with full certainty that pornography caused my husband to abandon me and our children. Although I loved him deeply, I was far from a perfect wife. In retrospect, I wish I had understood what he was experiencing and had acted to help him. If anything is clear to me, it is this: We must learn more about this scourge and its effects on families. The Witherspoon report makes it clear that countless women and increasingly many men have experienced the devastating effects of their spouses pornography use. Countless more will experience it in the future. It is our obligation as a nation to pursue the truth for their sake, no matter how inconvenient for some the verdict may be.
The author is a psychologist who lives with her children in Virginia.
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster is reacting to the arrest of a Minnesota man accused of selling his wife’s sexual services on the online classified site.
Buckmaster didn’t comment on the specifics of the Chicago arrest. But he said Wednesday that Craigslist works with law enforcement when called upon to help solve and prosecute crimes.
He also warns that using Craigslist for criminal purposes “is extremely unwise” because it leads to an electronic trail.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says 32-year-old Clinton Danner from Rockford, Minn., convinced his wife she would never see their preschooler again if she didn’t have sex with strangers for money.
Danner was arrested Sunday at a Chicago hotel. He faces a felony charge and is being held on $150,000 bond. It isn’t clear if he has an attorney.
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WRATH Campaign 