For clarification,
obscenity is not to be confused with soft-core pornography, known under the law
as harmful to minors/indecent content. This material is protected under the
constitution for adults, yet not for children in print and broadcast. Such laws
have not successfully been upheld by the Supreme Court to protect minor
children online. Nor is obscenity
to be confused with child pornography, which is illegal.
Because obscenity
laws have not been enforced, illegal "adult" pornography has flooded and
polluted the Internet. It continues to grow and spread and has reached epidemic
proportions. As you will hear today, we are indeed facing a national crisis
that is every bit as damaging to our citizens and our cultural environment as
the oil spill catastrophe is to the environment in the Gulf.
For fifteen years, children
have been spoon-fed a steady diet of pornography. Kids can easily access
a wide variety of free pornography in the privacy of their home or through any
Internet-enabled device. "Portable porn" via PDAs, mobile phones, gaming
devices and laptops now provide kids, as well as adults, "anywhere access" to
this drug of the new millennium.
Statistics show
that 7 in 10 kids have accidentally accessed pornography[2]
and 1 in 3 youth who viewed pornography viewed it intentionally[3]. Internet pornographers are great
innovators and use clever and deceptive marketing tactics to push their drug to
anyone and everyone. The majority of porn sites have free teaser images and
videos on their home pages and do not require any age verification. The content
on this XXX site contains graphic sex acts and lewd exhibition of the genitals.
For the purposes of this presentation, we have blurred the images on the slides
I will be showing you.
40% of kids
accidentally access pornography through innocent word searches[4].
What do you think of when you hear the term, "watersports'? Here you see a
captured screen of "watersports" which is explicit urination pornography with
women being treated as toilets.
12% of kids
accidently see pornography through misspelling a word[5].
Boys.com is a wholesome site for boys. Boyz misspelled, however is a hard-core
porn site. This is the homepage for boyz.com, which contains graphic
close-ups of homosexual acts. As
you can see, many porn sites also contain pornography advertised as "teen sex"
or "barely legal".
Pornographers also
misuse popular cartoons. Children can easily stumble upon "DisneyPornland" where they can see
their favorite Disney characters engaging in graphic sex acts.
Of course, kids can
always easily find pornography intentionally. This next slide is a captured
screen from a Google search on bestiality. This search yielded over 2,550,000 results. Kids can see men and women engaging in
sex acts with any animal on Noah's ark.
The average age of
first exposure is 11 years old,[6]
with some researchers saying first exposure is as young as 8 years old. 79% of
unwanted exposure is occurring in the home[7].
Parents, who should be the first line of defense, are forced to be the ONLY
line of defense to shoulder the entire burden of protecting their children from
prosecutable obscenity. This is unprecedented.
Does pornography
harm children? Yes it does. Pornography is not just harmless fun. I am now
going to show you a short excerpt from our Internet Safety 101 DVD teaching
series where you will hear from teenagers who share the damage that pornography
has had on their lives.
We have sacrificed
an entire generation's innocence on the altar of a misperception that prosecutable
"adult" pornography is protected under the First Amendment. It is NOT.
How many kids and
how many more generations will be destroyed by the unintended consequences of
our inaction to keep kids safe from this toxic drug? No child is immune.
We cannot undo the
extensive damage already done, which you will learn more about today. But we can continue doing what we have
been doing all along. Cry out "Enough Is Enough"! Today we are calling on
Congress and the Department of Justice to ensure that the aggressive
prosecution of our current obscenity laws is a priority. Our children's innocence is worth
fighting for. Thank you.
About The DC Group on
Pornography
The Coalition for War
on Illegal Pornography is an effort associated with The DC Group on Pornography,
a group of national organizations which meet quarterly in Washington, DC for
the purpose of education, strategic planning and action. The group has met with
the Department of Justice (DOJ) on several occasions asking that Federal Laws
prohibiting interstate transportation of adult obscene pornography be enforced.
About Enough Is Enough
Donna Rice Hughes is President of Enough Is Enough (EIE), a non-partisan, 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization, which emerged in 1994 as the national leader on the front lines to make
the Internet safer for children and families. Since then, EIE has continued to
pioneer efforts to confront online pornography, child pornography, sexual
predation, cyberbullying and sexting with innovative programs, the most recent
of which is Internet Safety 101.
[1] The Miller Court set forth what kind of depictions may be found
obscene: (a) "Patently offensive representations or descriptions of
ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated. (b) Patently
offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions,
and lewd exhibition of the genitals. The Court has also included
sado-masochistic" materials.
[2] Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-18 year olds. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation,
2006.
[3]Wolak, Mitchell and Finkelhor. Online Victimization of Youth:
Five Years Later. Alexandria, VA. National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. 2006.
[6]
Internet Filter Review.
[7]Wolak, Mitchell and Finkelhor. Online
Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later. Alexandria, VA. National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children. 2006.
