By James Tillman
WASHINGTON, DC, August 5, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – This Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the “first ever National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction.” The strategy is meant to provide a comprehensive threat assessment of the dangers children face, including child pornography, online stalking, and child sex tourism, and to outline how to fight them.
Robert Peters, President of Morality in Media (MIM), nevertheless pointed out that Holder's plan ignores an important fact: the proliferation of hardcore pornography leads to the sexual exploitation of children in a variety of ways. Holder's plan, he believes, thus ignores an important cause of the problem.
“Many perpetrators progress from viewing adult pornography to viewing child pornography,” he said.
Furthermore, he continued, those who sexually exploit children use hardcore adult pornography to groom their victims.
“Addiction to adult pornography wrecks marriages, and children raised in one-parent households are more likely to be sexually exploited,” he continued.
He pointed out that even the congressionally-created Child Online Protection Act (COPA) Commission recommended that adult pornography be prosecuted. Nevertheless, Holder's plan does not address the influence of hardcore adult pornography or explain how to prevent it.
Federal law prohibits the distribution of hardcore pornography over the Internet, but this prohibition is not widely enforced.
MIM has previously produced a report entitled “How Adult Pornography Contributes to Sexual Exploitation of Children.” It draws from news articles, court cases scholarly journals, social science studies, books, and Congressional testimony to argue Peters' case.
Others agree with Peters' opinion.
“You'll never solve the child pornography crisis in America without also prosecuting adult pornography,” said Pat Trueman, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund and founder of PornHarms.com.
He explained why those who view adult pornography naturally begin to watch child pornography as well.
“Because of the way the mind works, they're never satisfied,” he said. “And to maintain their sexual interest, they keep moving to harder and harder and more deviant material, and many move from adult, then down to child pornography because nothing else seems to give them a high.”
See related strories on LifeSiteNews.com:
'Mainstream' Porn is More and More about Child Porn
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/apr/060421a.html