Fighting abuse

Pornography is not a trivial offence because it can lead to ever-greater degradation, writes a US government lawyer who deals with sexual exploitation.

As an attorney for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), my daily work includes deporting aliens who sexually abuse minors, either physically or vicariously through child pornography. ICE both removes alien sexual predators and prosecutes citizens who prey on children. The scope of the problem is enormous. Since ICE’s inception on March 1, 2003, we have arrested over 5500 sexual predators.

What moves someone to sexually exploit a child? Thomas Aquinas, one of the great moral philosophers in the Western tradition, stated that impurity can lead to violence. Many contemporary religious and social critics would similarly assert that pornography facilitates sexual violence. Does social science bear this out?

In November 2004, the US Senate Committee on Commerce heard testimony from a number of doctors, therapists and researchers who have studied the effects of pornography. One witness testified that pornography “increases the likelihood of sexual addiction... Sexual addicts also develop tolerance and will need more and harder kinds of pornographic material.”

ICE has arrested hundreds of persons in the US for possessing and distributing child pornography. Some of those arrested included a 7th grade teacher, a chief of paediatric medicine at a large hospital, a police officer, a minister at an all-girls school. How many of these people began by viewing adult pornography? How many of these people, looking for new and more exciting images on the internet, quickly descended into child pornography?

During the Senate hearing, another witness discussed a study involving men and women who regularly viewed non-violent adult pornography. The results demonstrated that “those who use pornography were found to be more likely to go to prostitutes, engage in domestic violence, stranger rape, date rape, and incest.” Such prolonged exposure also resulted in viewers who “trivialised rape as a criminal offence,” and “trivialised non-violent forms of the sexual abuse of children.”

Another witness commented that “children who have porn-viewing fathers complain that when he looks at them it feels ‘creepy... The parental gaze has become the porn gaze.” In deporting alien sexual predators who abused their teenage daughters or female relatives, its been my experience that pornography often fed the fire of desire towards their children.

Adult pornography is certainly not the only cause of sexual violence. And many who view adult pornography may never physically exploit a child (although with the relative ease to view child pornography via the internet, many viewers of adult internet porn may sink into child porn). But the act of viewing pornography is certainly exploiting those featured in the pornography. Persons become mere objects to satisfy one’s sexual pleasure.

Moreover, due to the demand for “adult” entertainment, sexually exploited children often continue down the path of further exploitation in the sex industry. Another witness stated that “they work in the porn industry with its physical invasion and visual invasion because it feels like home.”

All this points to the need to reduce the toxic effects and broad scope of adult pornography and sexually oriented businesses in our communities. For example, companies with investments in pornography can divest from such holdings, and their stockholders should insist they do so. Churches should also recognise that some of their members suffer from addictions to pornography, and provide compassionate outreach to help them. Parents should exercise extreme vigilance so that their children’s use of the internet does not become a portal to sexual depravity. And each of such should make a personal choice to struggle against the allure of pornography.

Shakespeare perhaps described lust best as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme.”

Adult pornography can and does lead to more extreme and violent forms of pornography. While ICE can and does prosecute citizens and remove aliens who engage in such criminal activity, we must all fight against what causes it.

Paul Hunker is Chief Counsel of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas. He graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1992, and is a resident of Dallas, Texas. The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of ICE.