WASHINGTON — A U.S. State Department advisory council on human trafficking issued a report last month that seems to be recycling talking points popular with right-wing anti-porn groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Exodus Cry. TechDirt.com editor Mike Masnick pointed this out in a recent post, noting the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking’s 2021 annual report. He calls the report “a weird document in so many ways” and “incredibly bizarre, incorrect.”
The report was submitted to the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons by a council of 11 people “who bring their expertise and experience to advise and provide recommendations…to improve federal anti-trafficking policies.” Unfortunately, the report takes issue to the porn industry and the consumption of porn in the United States, altogether.
“We recommend…address[ing] the gaps and issues relating to the intersection between pornography, human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation,” the report states, opening an entire section on the council’s observations regarding porn and trafficking.
The report highlights that 16 states in the union already have declared porn a “public health crisis.” Anti-porn groups, which have lobbied for states to pass such nonbinding resolutions, often cite this fact to argue for additional restrictions on First Amendment-protected forms of speech and sexual expression.
“As of November 2020, 16 U.S. states have passed resolutions recognizing pornography as a public health issue,” the report notes. “It is time that the federal government also take deliberate action to acknowledge the direct links between pornography and human trafficking and address it as a threat to society.”
The advisory council also recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services allocate funding and resources to research any potential public health harms caused by porn.
“This effort should also address the correlation between pornography consumption and sexual violence, as well as the correlation between pornography use and sex buying behaviors,” they claim, via a study accusing the adult industry of not countering CSAM and illegal content.
Unsurprisingly, the advisory council didn’t cite any reports documenting the industry’s counter-CSAM and abuse efforts. Nor does the report reference the multi-million dollar efforts of studios and production companies by funding foundations like the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP). YNOT has reported on ASACP extensively in the past, including the revelation that former New York Times opinion contributor Nicholas Kristof never reached out to them to understand the adult industry’s counter-CSAM work.
That’s beside the point, though. The point is a taxpayer-funded advisory council working to advocate for human trafficking rights relies on the talking points of groups who use the real and serious issues of human trafficking and sex trafficking to argue that all sex work is illegitimate and that consensually and legally-produced porn should be banned.
Further, the advisory council issued a note to Congress asking lawmakers to quickly reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 as a measure to eliminate the third-party liability shied that adult platforms and virtually all tech rely on to protect their users.
“Sex trafficking of children and adults has proliferated online in part because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996…has been interpreted by federal and state courts to: 1) prohibit sex trafficking victims from suing websites that advertise them as being for sale; and 2) prevent states from enforcing criminal laws against websites that carry ads for sex trafficking,” the report states. “Therefore, we recommend Congress amend Section 230…to empower victims and their attorneys, and states, territories, tribes, and localities to use all applicable criminal and civil laws to effectively combat human trafficking, including the commercial sexual exploitation of children online.”
To support that note to Congress, the council members cites only one-sided reports by NCOSE as its ‘evidence.’
With respect to the “public health crisis” arguments, the recipients of the report might consider that most public health experts in contemporary academia seem to believe porn isn’t a public health crisis. In January of 2020, two researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health wrote an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health calling the claims that porn is a public health crisis from groups like NCOSE aren’t scientifically sound.
“The movement to declare pornography a public health crisis is rooted in an ideology that is antithetical to many core values of public health promotion and is a political stunt, not reflective of best available evidence,” the researchers, Kimberly M. Nelson and Emily F. Rothman (assistant professor and professor of community health sciences at Boston University, respectively), argue in their editorial.
Nelson and Rothman argue that porn doesn’t meet the definition of a public health crisis laid out in the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice. Porn does not “directly or imminently” lead to “death, disease, property destruction, or population displacement; and it does not overwhelm local health systems,” Nelson and Rothman go on to argue.
They further write that the social and scientific evidence suggests that while some negative health consequences occur for some people, there are absolutely no cases of substantial health consequences for the vast majority of people who consume porn. Nelson and Rothman argue that there needs to be more education about porn and sexual responsibility — especially among youth. But that’s a far cry from suggesting porn is driving, or even contributing to, a public health crisis.
“Porn makes for an easy target. But legislators focused on labeling it as a public-health crisis should consider what problems they are actually trying to solve,” Olga Khazan, a staff writer for The Atlantic, wrote in July of 2021. “Many researchers and adult-entertainment workers support measures that would reduce kids’ access to porn, ensure that porn videos portray only consenting adults, and mandate fair wages for sex workers…. Calling adults’ legal use of pornography a “public health crisis” doesn’t do any of that.”
The advisory council’s assertions of a connection between sex trafficking and porn aren’t supported by the data, either. As YNOT reported earlier this year, data collected by the Human Trafficking Institute suggests the true hotbed for the sex trafficking of minors and adults is on mainstream social media platforms like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. With the occasional highly publicized exception, adult entertainment businesses work vigorously to self-regulate, ensure compliance, and cooperate with the already-in-place regulatory regime the U.S. federal and state governments have.
