Traci DeVette Griggs | April 1, 2020 | SHARE: 
Extensive research into the public health harms of pornography use has found that it can be linked to child sexual abuse, violence against women, neurological problems in the brain, and much more. This is why over fifteen states have declared pornography a public health hazard. But many people may not be aware just how far the dark web of the porn industry stretches, and how several popular businesses and companies have connections to this dangerous industry.
Haley McNamara is Vice President of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCoSE), and she joins Traci DeVette Griggs on this week’s Family Policy Mattersradio show and podcast to discuss why fighting pornography is such a critical issue, and what we can do to help in the fight.
“There are a lot of people who stand to make money from the pornography business,” says McNamara. “Of course there are the producers and the agents that are working on pornography itself, but we also have many mainstream companies that are promoting it, facilitating it and profiting from it.”
Some of the biggest mainstream groups McNamara names are Amazon, Google, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, the Department of Defense, and Hilton Hotels, as well as social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to NCoSE’s work, Google, Hilton Hotels, and the Department of Defense have now changed their use of and connection to the porn industry.
“I think when we make these kinds of policy improvements at the corporate level,” says McNamara, “they certainly have a ripple effect in many ways, including on our cultural values and saying that we are going to respect the human dignity of each person rather than seeing them as sexual commodities.”
McNamara encourages concerned citizens to reach out to these companies “to ask that they improve their systems.” Also, “in the midst of social distancing, self-isolation and quarantines, we know that there is a large increase of children who are spending more time online than they ever would have before […] We are really encouraging parents to talk to your kids about their internet usage.”
Tune in to Family Policy Mattersthis week to hear Haley McNamara expose far reaching arms of the porn indsutry, and provide encouragment for those who want to fight back.
TRACI GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Many of us might envision dingy, dimly lit rooms when we think of the adult film industry, but this is far from the truth anymore. While the porn industry is valued in the billions of dollars, the reality is that its tentacles are much more far-reaching and involve many more businesses and industries than we might realize.
Haley McNamara is Vice President of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which is committed to exposing the dark underbelly of this business. She joins us today to discuss why this is such an important issue and what we can do to affect change.
Haley McNamara, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
HALEY MCNAMARA: Thanks for having me.
TRACI GRIGGS: We often hear, “It’s not our business what someone is doing in the privacy of their own home.” They say, “It’s not really hurting anybody,” or “It’s a matter of free speech.” So, what’s the problem with these arguments and why is it so important that we not look the other way on this issue?
HALEY MCNAMARA: Well, really we’re entering into a phase where we’re seeing a rise in research on the actual public health harms of pornography. And once a social or health issue involves problems that affect individuals or groups beyond their capacity to correct, responsibility starts shifting from individual accountability to holding the forces and the influences that caused it accountable. So, research is showing the public health harms of pornography is linked to child sexual abuse, compulsive sexual behavior, violence against women, sexual dysfunctions, neurological problems in the brain, and really so much more. What we’re seeing is not just a matter of individual choice, it’s a matter of how it’s impacting your own health and your loved ones as well.
TRACI GRIGGS: Right. And these connections aren’t just hearsay, right? I mean, these are researched answers.
HALEY MCNAMARA: Absolutely. You know, even just since 2010 there have been over 40 major studies, for example, that have revealed that pornography has negative and in fact detrimental impacts on the brain. This includes a 2014 study that found that pornography is linked to decreased brain matter in the areas of decision making. And you know, there’s so much more research on the brain that links to sexual violence. Child-on-child sexual abuse is a really hidden crisis right now in America, of children acting out in harmful sexual ways because they’re reenacting what they’ve been exposed to in hardcore pornography. And I think that we can see that this is something we need to be critical of based on the fact that this is a completely new variable in the human experience. You know, younger generations right now are the first to grow up with the access to this kind of hardcore, endlessly novel, endlessly violent material online.
TRACI GRIGGS: That’s chilling. We mentioned in the introduction that there’s a wide web, and beyond what people might realize. Tell us how wide is that web that keeps pornography available?
HALEY MCNAMARA: Right, there are a lot of people who stand to make money from the pornography business. So, of course there are the producers and the agents that are working on pornography itself, but we also have many mainstream companies that are promoting it, facilitating it and profiting from it. We’ve seen that, for example, with Google, which in the past used to have ads that would link directly to hardcore pornography websites. Thankfully, our organization took action and they’ve now stopped doing that through the dirtydozenlist.com. But we also see that there are other companies such as Amazon that hosts the privacy for their online websites. It does web-hosting for them, and then is profiting from pornography that way. We see major credit card companies are processing payments for this industry. And all the while not recognizing the public health harms, but also the pornography industry’s inherent link to sex-trafficking and child sexual abuse as well.
TRACI GRIGGS: What are some of the less obvious organizations that are making pornography possible?
HALEY MCNAMARA: I would definitely highlight Visa right now as a credit card company that’s on the Dirty Dozen List. This is not alone; Visa, MasterCard and Discover all partner with the pornography industry processing their payments despite the fact that real-life videos of sex-trafficked women, and of children being sexually abused have been found on many of these sites. So, we’re absolutely calling on all of these major credit card companies to stop processing those payments. In fact, last fall PayPal stopped processing those payments, so we know it’s something that they can do. Actually, if you go to dirtydozenlist.com you can help us reach out to Visa executives. We have a little form that you can fill out and you can actually email them directly asking them to stop profiting from sexual exploitation.
TRACI GRIGGS: So that’s a great example of one success story from your organization. Your organization really is on the front lines regarding social media, as well, in calling out these mainstream social media companies that you say are enabling, and even funding pornography. Tell us a little bit about your strategy as far as addressing some of those concerns.
HALEY MCNAMARA: I’ll often have people ask me, “Okay, so sex trafficking is a problem on Instagram, does that mean that I need to delete my Instagram?” And that’s not necessarily the answer. Maybe that’s the answer for you, but what we typically advocate for is not boycotting but actually taking an affirmative action. A lot of companies really do pay attention to customer complaints, or to bad reviews online, or to someone who is saying something negative about their company on social media. These companies care about the way that they’re presented in the public. We are asking people to reach out to the companies, either through our website or directly yourself to ask for change. And we’ve seen that that’s been incredibly successful. For example, because of that we’ve seen some really important improvements happening at Snapchat and Instagram. I mentioned Google Play now has a policy to prohibit pornographic apps in their app store, whereas before advocates, like your listeners, took action, they were allowing that. We’ve definitely seen success through this, which is helpful because these are very dark subjects. But we know that if we take affirmative action, we actually have a good track record.
TRACI GRIGGS: What about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter? Are they also having some issues with this?
HALEY MCNAMARA: Absolutely. One thing that’s a little bit frightening about Facebook right now is that they’re pursuing encryption methods, even on things like Messenger Kids. Of course, encryption we’re not actively against, we recognize the desire for privacy. However, if we’re going to be doing that, we need to do it in a way that we can still protect children from sexual predators.
On Twitter, we see that Twitter is really ground zero for social media sexual exploitation, right now. They blatantly allow pornography, they blatantly allow escort and prostitution accounts to be running. So, we know that there’s a significant amount of sex-trafficking happening on Twitter as well, because pornographic images and videos that are being shared and used to advertise for real-life victims offline. We certainly know that those platforms are a problem.
There are many predators on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram that are reaching out to children very regularly, asking them for nude images, nude videos, and then using that to extort them,
really, to blackmail them into either sending more of these kinds of images or even into meeting in real life where they could later be sexually abused or sex-trafficked. Tragically we’ve met with, and I’ve personally spoken with individuals who this has happened to, and that’s really a trend across all social media, even across video games where there’s an online chat component. So certainly, I would recommend in addition to reaching out to the companies to ask that they improve their systems, that they get proactive algorithms to stop this kind of predatory behavior. I also would recommend that parents really talk with your kids about who they talk to online, whether they think that they’re a friend or not. It’s important for you to know who they’re speaking with and to make sure that your child is safe.
TRACI GRIGGS: You mentioned earlier you’ve had some good results. Any other companies or industries that are stepping up and making some changes?
HALEY MCNAMARA: Yeah, we’ve seen really significant improvements with Comcast; we’ve met with them several times. They said that they heard our feedback and made improvements to their parental controls, which was really amazing. After our advocacy, the Department of Defense stopped selling pornography in army and air force base exchanges, which is quite significant if you think about the military’s problem with sexual assault, it’s important that they not also fuel attitudes that are inherently degrading towards women. We’ve also really had a big impact on the hotel industry, in the last few years we’ve gotten Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, Intercontinental Hotel Groups, and Starwood to all stop selling pornography-on-demand in their guest rooms.
So that’s a big chunk of change out of the pornography industry’s pocket, which I don’t mind at all, but we all know that that makes a real-world difference. People who are able to go to these hotels and not be attempted with those images. And I even spoke with a sex-trafficking survivor who was trafficked in one of those hotel chains and she said that when she would go in, men would often buy pornography on the TV and force her to act out what they saw. And she said that when she realized the hotel was no longer selling those materials, she felt like maybe someone out there actually cared about women like her. I think when we make these kinds of policy improvements at the corporate level, they certainly have a ripple effect in many ways, including just on our cultural values and saying that we are going to respect the human dignity of each person rather than seeing them as sexual commodities.
TRACI GRIGGS: Wow, great example. So, we’ve started seeing some state legislatures take some action on this as well, right?
HALEY MCNAMARA: Yes, we have had at least 15 states now declare pornography a public health hazard, or recognized its public health harms formally. These are fantastic resolutions that really just recognize the research. Then it raises awareness and makes it much easier for the state to say, “Okay, let’s re-look at the filters, the libraries, or in the public schools where taxpayer money is going,” and make sure that these spaces are free from pornography as well.
TRACI GRIGGS: And while we’re doing this interview, we are in the midst of much of our country being locked down and actually not just our country, but many countries in the world are being locked down because of the COVID-19 virus. With all this time on our hands, do you have any special concerns? Does this create any additional problems do you think, for this issue?
HALEY MCNAMARA: It really does. You know, in the midst of social distancing, self-isolation and quarantines, we know that there is a large increase of children who are spending more time online than they ever would have before. And it’s a sad reality to know that wherever children are, predators will flock to that space, so we know that that’s happening online. We are really encouraging parents to talk to your kids about their internet usage. Ask them, you know, if they’re chatting with people online, who are they chatting with? These are really important things to talk about in a non-accusatory way, but really just make sure that you’re tuned-in with your child’s online actions. And then we also are encouraging parents to make sure that they’re setting up parental controls, making sure that they’re limiting time online or making sure that pornography is not allowed on the child’s devices. You can set a lot of really great filters through Google’s SafeSearch. There are great parental controls on all of the different apps that you use as well. We encourage you to look at those and then also talk to your kid about why it’s important to be careful online.
TRACI GRIGGS: You have a lot of this information that you’ve just told us on your website. Tell us where that is and how people can access it.
HALEY MCNAMARA: Yes. If you are wanting to learn more and take action about corporations facilitating sexual exploitation, I would direct you towards dirtydozenlist.com and if you’re curious just to learn more about our work in general and also maybe some of our advice during the coronavirus, we just put out a blog with some examples of filters that might be helpful for you to look at with your family. You can find that information at endsexualexploitation.org.
TRACI GRIGGS: Thank you very much, Haley McNamara, Vice President of National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Thank you for being with us on Family Policy Matters.
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