A View from Riverside Drive

Commentary by Ed Hynes
October 2004

Murdered prostitutes—a compelling argument for obscenity law enforcement

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals caused an uproar in Canada last spring when they put up billboards showing a young woman, a smiling pig, and the slogan, "Neither of us is meat." Provocative it was, as PETA intended. Vegetarians could applaud, and so could those who see that it's wrong and harmful to prize women because of their body parts. A message that could be inferred from the slogan—that protecting women is no more important than saving pigs—was clearly not intended.

But the timing was something else. Canadians had been reading about a pig farmer accused of killing 15 women on his farm outside Vancouver. There was even a suspicion that meat products from the farm contained human remains. Outraged by the billboards, relatives of the murdered women protested, along with nearly everyone else in Canada, it seemed, including Prime Minister Paul Martin. The billboard messages came down. (The Canadian Press, April 22, 2004.)

The women were said to have been street prostitutes. Their murders provoked calls for the protection of prostitutes. How? By legalizing the "sex trade," an idea that has been tried elsewhere in the world and has been found to cause any number of bad effects, including the proliferation of brothels and an increase in the trafficking of women and girls who are needed to stock the newly legal brothels as enslaved "sex workers."

Legalization is good for brothel owners, pimps and traffickers, but not for the women and children whose bodies they rent out. (For more on this subject, see the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women at its web site.)

A strong case has been made for going at the problems of prostitution from a different direction: by arresting and punishing the "johns" who create the demand for prostitutes. In Sweden, arresting the johns and thus scaring off demand has caused a decline in the number of street prostitutes, following the immutable laws of supply and demand. If this had been done in Vancouver, some of the murdered women might have been spared simply because they might have given up working the streets, where serial killers sometimes roam.

On a more fundamental level, the sex-for-sale problem needs to be dug out root and branch, beginning with the prosecution of criminals who create the obscenity that stimulates the "johns" who create the demand. It's a four-cushion shot, but doable. And needed. For a recent discussion of the connection between porn and violent sex crimes - including violent sex crimes against prostitutes—see the article, The Link Between Pornography and Violent Sex Crimes.

Porn's effect on at least some men has been scaring hotel workers in Oslo, who say they've been solicited and harassed by men who watch porn movies on their in-room television systems. The workers want the movies banned.

Step one: Shut down Porn Valley, California.

The U.S. hardcore pornography racket is a criminal enterprise in search of mainstream respectability. Those involved in this criminal enterprise operate openly in the San Fernando Valley of California and elsewhere. Some of them have prospered to the point that their equities are publicly traded. This is a striking measure of the failure of the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute violations of the obscenity laws for about ten years, from the early 1990s. This failure is a national disgrace with international and deadly consequences.

Hardcore pornography is all over the Internet, of course. "Adult businesses" that market hardcore pornography can be found in communities large and small. Cable and Satellite TV systems, hotel movie systems and neighborhood video shops are big on triple-X videos. Our pop culture is loaded with pornographic imagery and ideas. It's influenced our fashion and music industries, the games sold to children and, this year, even our children's Halloween costumes. How respectable is that?

Porn-related sales amount to perhaps ten or twelve billion dollars annually, a very large sum. But that is still only about one-tenth of one percent of gross domestic product in the United States. In other words, Americans spend 99.9 percent of their money on anything and everything but porn. They spend twice as much for ice cream as for porn, for example, four times as much for lawn and garden supplies, and so on. The list is enormously long.

The 22nd annual AVN Awards program (conducted by Adult Video News) is a ludicrous effort to project an image of respectability for the porn racketeers. AVN tries to make it look like the Oscars, except it's in Las Vegas, not Hollywood, and the award categories are different. For example: Best Gonzo Release, Best All-Girl Sex Scene, Best Anal Sex Scene, Best Oral Sex Scene, Best Group Sex Scene, Best Threeway Sex Scene, Best Solo Sex Scene, Most Outrageous Sex Scene, Best Tease Performance. It's just hardcore sex, hardcore sex, and more hardcore sex.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined two porn companies $30,000 each in September for allowing their "stars" to do sex scenes without condoms. This followed an HIV outbreak earlier this year that temporarily shut down all porn production in southern California.

The Miami Herald (August 30) reports that the government of China, after years of neglect, decided this summer to enforce its laws against explicit sex in the media, taking "new steps dealing with the burgeoning pornography industry, launching a nationwide crackdown on the sale of so-called yellow discs and the operation of pornographic websites. President Hu Jintao, calling for a people's war against such 'contaminated material,' pledged to punish pornography purveyors severely."

A "Beijing official" is quoted in the story as saying, "This is China's new big problem. . . . Many people consider pornography the nation's No. 1 social ill, even more so than gambling and drugs. It's become that serious."

The Herald reported that "China's new sexuality has come at a price: Along with the spread of HIV and AIDS, the popularity of pornography among youths has Communist Party officials alarmed. Teens regularly surf porn at the Internet cafes that serve China's 90 million online users. Many of them have personal computers and cellphone screens featuring soft-porn images."

Porn defenders in the U.S. claim that opposition to pornography is primarily a "puritanical" religious thing. How then do they explain China's opposition to pornography? Perhaps atheistic communists recognize what religious and nonreligious Americans have also long recognized—i.e., pornography is harmful to society.

ABC TV's 20/20 show on August 27 gave viewers an insight into the destructive power of cyberporn.

"Most of us navigate quickly past the [online sex] come-ons," said 20/20 in a news release about the program. "But for some who are enticed to open these cyber doors, one click can ruin their lives." One man interviewed for the story said on camera, ""I thought it was just a recreational thing that I could do on my own, but it cost me everything. . . . Internet pornography is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction."

He told 20/20 that he "kept his habit a secret from his wife. . . for 14 years. But eventually his life came crashing down, just like that of an alcoholic hitting rock bottom. In this case, though, the drug of choice was cyberporn."

A woman told 20/20, "Every man I've talked to has started out with a Playboy. And now they spend hours upon hours on the Internet."

But Playboy founder Hugh Hefner doesn't seem to get it. He told the Chicago Sun-Times of Sunday, September 26, "I'm a pretty moral guy. Now, it's morality as I perceive it. Morality is what is perceived as good for people. . . . I try to do what's right. . . ."

Early in 2004, CBS found itself on the public relations defensive because of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" that shocked millions of viewers during the Super Bowl halftime show. Then the George W. Bush National Guard story blew up into a major embarrassment for the network because some people at CBS News ran with a story without the three essentials of good journalism: accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. It will be remembered as Rathergate or Memogate.

And now, as a consequence of Ms. Jackson's partial nudity on that occasion, the Federal Communications Commission has made CBS the first TV network ever fined for violating the broadcast indecency law. (What took the FCC so long is another matter.) The amount was $550,000, which was an aggregation of the maximum fine, $27,500, imposed on each of the 20 stations that are owned and operated by CBS.

Was the fine big enough to put an end to nudity at CBS? Consider this: CBS charged advertisers $76,000 per second for commercial time during the Super Bowl. That comes to $550,000 in just over seven seconds. CBS likely will clean up its half time show at future Super Bowls, but pressure from the NFL and the public will have more to do with that than the any fine.

Bills approved overwhelmingly in the Senate and House would raise the maximum fine tenfold, to $275,000 per incident. Differences in the two bills need to be resolved in a House-Senate conference committee. At this higher level, CBS's fine would have been $5,500,000, which is getting closer to real money for CBS. To pay a fine that size would cost CBS the income from the sale of 72 precious seconds of Super Bowl commercial time.

Way back when, incidentally, the late Republican Senator Everitt Dirksen of Illinois defined "real money" in a way Washingtonians would understand: "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money." The Senator wasn't being cavalier about taxpayers' money; he was chiding his colleagues for their free-spending ways.

The Rand Corporation has found that teenage boys and girls who view a lot of sexual content on television are twice as likely as those who don't watch much sexual content to have sexual intercourse within the following year. The study results were published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the September 2004 issue of Pediatrics magazine. But how many teenagers don't see a lot of sex on television? And how do they avoid it?

In July, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics released some evidence of the social and family instability that follows premature sexual activity, which is what the Rand study says sex on TV leads to. The Forum found that in the United States, "One in three women giving birth is now unmarried, up from 5% [i.e. one in 20] in 1960. The proportion of children under 18 living in single parent families rose from 23% to 31% between 1980 and 2000, reflecting increased rates of both nonmarital childbearing and divorce."

Michael J. Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced that ICE agents have arrested more than 4,000 suspected child sex abusers in Operation Predator in just over a year and that more than 1,500 non-Americans among the suspects have been deported to the countries they came from. In addition, foreign law enforcement officials have arrested more than 750 sexual predators in their countries, Mr. Garcia reported in a news release.

He added, "These 4,000 Operation Predator arrests are an outstanding achievement as well as a sobering statistic. We have taken 4,000 of the worst criminals off the street, but we also realize how much more work we have to do," said Assistant Secretary Garcia. "Child sex predators can come from all walks of life and we know from the arrests we have made that they can occupy positions of trust in the community—as doctors, as teachers, as youth leaders, as ministers and clergy. That makes the work we are doing in Operation Predator all the more urgent."

Mr. Garcia continued: "One way we are helping to investigate crimes against children and help recover children who may have been abused is through the National Child Victim Identification System, where more than 1,230 children have been identified in pornographic images. . . . Those arrested have included a California 7th grade teacher, the chief of pediatric medicine at a New York hospital, a minister at an all-girls school in New Jersey, a Louisiana Catholic priest, a Nevada camp counselor, a Buffalo police officer, a New Jersey Boy Scout volunteer and a Chicago school principal."

Members of the public wishing to report suspicious activity may contact ICE at 1-866-DHS-2ICE or Operation.Predator@dhs.gov. Additionally, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an ICE partner on Operation Predator, can be contacted at 1-800-843-5678 or www.cybertipline.com. Additional information about Operation Predator is posted at www.ice.gov.

When a convicted child molester admitted that he had downloaded child pornography at the Phoenix, Arizona, public library in August, the mayor and City Council decided not to wait any longer for the Federal government to find a filtering solution that would survive challenge in the courts. Cybercast News Service reported September 20 that the Council "voted unanimously to immediately block all pornography from the public library's web terminals," describing the new policy as "the toughest yet in any major American city." And now the question is whether the city's policy will survive the same sort of challenge.

CNS quotes ACLU Executive Director Eleanor Eisenberg as saying, "We've heard from people who are concerned about this. We have several possible plaintiffs. This will end up in the (U.S.) Supreme Court."

But you can't really call that news.

Howard Stern announced on October 7 that he will leave conventional radio in January 2006, bringing his salacious program to Sirius Satellite Radio. Sirius and XM Satellite Radio are pioneering the new, subscription-only medium, which is not subject to Federal Communications Commission regulation. XM has its own refugees from the FCC—the shock jocks Opie and Anthony. Mr. Stern said he looked forward to reducing Clear Channel Communications properties to rubble from his new satellite perch. Clear Channel dropped the Stern program in April. "My dream is that places like Clear Channel will have $100 million properties, and I can take those properties and reduce them to rubble, that literally I can make them worthless. They'll look like antiques when we're done." In 1998, Mr. Stern predicted that his new CBS Saturday night TV show would destroy NBC's Saturday Night Live and would be "the savior of the Tiffany Network." It didn't happen.

"None of the kids should have to stand up there," said Kelli Bowen. "Up there" was the street corner in Omaha where her 11-year-old daughter and other children waited for the school bus each weekday morning. There was a problem: The kids shared the intersection with prostitutes, pimps and johns. Ms. Bowen complained and the Omaha Public Schools responded quickly, not by arresting everyone involved in the prostitution but by moving the bus stop to a different corner. The mayor, city council, police chief and public school administration all were involved.

The Omaha World Herald (September 10, 2004) reported, with apparent satisfaction, "Now the prostitutes have the intersection to themselves, thanks to Kelli Bowen." It added, "Bowen is relieved."

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