Human Slavery and Pornography, at Home and Abroad



Did you know that human slavery still flourishes worldwide?

“Trafficking in human beings is nothing less than a modern form of slavery,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June as she released her department’s fifth annual Trafficking in Persons Report. According to the report, somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year. Of these, fully half are children and 80 percent are female.

The report says that poverty, corruption, and poor education are among the factors that allow human trafficking to flourish. The victims are often used to supply the growing global demand for cheap or slave labor, conscripted soldiers, forced prostitutes, and child sex objects.

All of this is bad; especially the idea of unwilling women being kidnapped and forced into prostitution, but that last part about the child sex victims is what bothers me most. When grownups — most often perverted older men — exploit innocent children for their own predatory sexual gratification, that depraved conduct clearly crosses the line beyond what any civilized society should tolerate.

Unfortunately, the problem of child sex abuse is not something that just happens in some remote, backward corner of the globe. Right here in America, an estimated 400,000 children are sexually exploited every year (not to mention the millions of women abducted or lured into prostitution).

What fans the flames of this wildfire of sex slavery and child sex abuse? I personally think it’s the combined influence of the American entertainment and pornography industries.

According to the Rand Corporation, standards of decency are falling throughout the American popular culture, and much of the blame for that goes back to the entertainment industry that both glamorizes the notion of recreational sex without consequences and also normalizes aberrant behavior. “If everyone’s talking about sex or having it, and something bad hardly ever comes out of it, because it doesn’t on TV, then they think, ‘Hey, the whole world’s doing it, and I need to,’” the Rand report explained.

Adding readily available pornography to that already relaxed moral climate amounts to throwing gasoline on a grassfire and producing a full-fledged raging forest fire.

Pornography is just as addictive as any narcotic drug, as serial sex killer Ted Bundy notoriously admitted just before his execution. Numerous other sex offenders have bolstered Bundy’s testimony, as has clinical scientific research.

“Pornography triggers a myriad of endogenous, internal, natural drugs that mimic the high from a street drug,” reports Judith Reisman, PhD., an acknowledged expert in the field of pornography and sex addiction. “Testimony from victims and police commonly finds pornography to be an on-site-sex-abuse manual.”

Just as drug addictions start small and escalate until they are out of control, so do sexual perversions triggered by pornography. I believe we will see an increase in violent sexual crimes so long as the addictive narcotic of hard-core pornography is readily available on newsstands and TV and the Internet.

So there you have it. The greedy purveyors of pornography are creating more and more sex addicts whose depraved desires ultimately result in carnal crimes against women and children. Their insatiable demands stimulate amoral slave-traders to increase the supply of helpless victims. The sinful cycle of fleshly lust and greed feeds upon itself and grows.

Yet amazingly, pornography has gone mainstream within the last few years. Pretty porn starlet Jenna Jameson appears on Larry King Live as the new public face of porn. Another XXX-rated actress, Mary Carey, recently joined President and Laura Bush at a big GOP fundraising dinner in Washington, DC, along with her boss Mark Kulkis, a porn distributor who also contributes big bucks to the Republican Party.

We judge drug traffickers, and especially so-called kingpins, deserving of more severe criminal punishment than casual drug users precisely because their personal greed produces so many human victims. We used to take the same approach toward pornographers, before some misguided “free speech” zealots distorted the original meaning of the First Amendment.

It’s time we come back to common sense before more irreversible damage is done to countless human lives. If that means “censorship” of Hollywood movies — and stiff prison sentences and heavy fines for those who appear in, produce, and distribute hard-core pornography — so be it.

(Nathan Tabor is a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina. He has his BA in psychology and his MA in public policy. He is a contributing editor at www.theconservativevoice.com. Contact him at [email protected].)

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