The Daily Signal - The True Effects of Watching Porn

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Haley Halverson of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation discusses pornography crisis in this country, how it's changing us, and what can be done about it. We also cover these stories: Turkey’s military takes action at the Syrian border. Two people are killed near a synagogue in Germany on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Thanks to the D.C. City Council, the nation’s capital won’t be celebrating Columbus Day on Monday.  The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You also can leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, October 10th. I'm Rachel Dahl-Judis. And I'm Kate Trinco. Today, we feature Rachel's interview with Haley Halverson of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation about the porn crisis in this country and what can be done. And don't forget, if you are enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Turkey's military is taking action at the Syrian border. President Recep Erdogan of Turkey tweeted,

The Turkish armed forces, together with the Syrian National Army, just launched Operation Peace Spring against PKK, YPG, and Daesh terrorists in northern Syria. Our mission is to prevent the creation of a terror corridor across our southern border and to bring peace to the area. Operation Peace Spring will neutralize terror threats against Turkey and lean to the establishment of a safe zone, facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes. We will preserve Syria's territorial integrity and liberate local communities from terrorists. President Donald Trump isn't taking favorably

to Turkey's military presence on the border with Syria. The United States does not endorse this attack and has made it clear to Turkey that this operation is a bad idea, Trump said in a statement. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who often supports Trump, has been unabashedly critical of the situation.

Graham tweeted, If media reports are accurate and Turkey has entered northern Syria, a disaster is in the making. Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump administration. This move ensures the re-emergence of ISIS. He also said that he is urging Trump to, quote, change course while there is still time by going back to the safe zone concept that was working. Two people near a synagogue were killed Wednesday in Germany.

Wednesday was the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur. Reports suggest that the shooter was ideologically on the far right and that the shooting could have resulted in many more deaths under different circumstances. While one suspect has been reportedly arrested, it's not clear if he was helped by others. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nanyahu said in a statement, the terror attack against the Jewish community of Hal Germany on Yom Kippur, the holiest day for our people, is another manifestation.

of the anti-Semitism in Europe. 500,000 Californians are without power as Pacific Gas and Electric, the largest utility company in California, shut off power as a safety measure against potential wildfires. Parts of Central and Northern California are currently experiencing high winds and low humidity, creating the perfect storm for wildfires to brew. A meteorologist from the National Weather Service Sacramento Office said the high winds occurring Wednesday may be the strongest,

since the North Bay fires two years ago, according to the New York Times. Former North Carolina Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is speaking out about the NBA, which famously moved the All-Star game from North Carolina over the state's so-called bathroom bill, which required that in government buildings people use the bathroom that matched the sex on their driver's licenses.

Now, the NBA is being accused of favoring communist China after a general manager deleted a tweet expressing support for the Hong Kong protesters. McCory told the Charlotte Observer, I see hypocrisy. They wanted to involve themselves with North Carolina commerce and an election while not setting the same standard for China.

Thanks to Washington, D.C.'s city council, the nation's capital won't be celebrating Columbus Day on Monday. Instead, it will be celebrating Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus Day, after the body passed last-minute legislation to change the nation. of the federal holiday to quote, honor indigenous peoples and their rich history and cultural contributions.

Next up, we'll feature Rachel's interview about the porn crisis in America. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. We're joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Haley Halverson. Haley is the vice president of advocacy and outreach at the National Center for Sexual Exploitation, where she develops and executes national campaigns to change policies and raise awareness.

Haley, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you so much for having me. So can you start off by explaining what the National Center for Sexual Exploitation does and your role in advocacy there? Yes. So we are a nonpartisan nonprofit that's dedicated, really our central thesis, is to expose the links between all forms of sexual exploitation and abuse, from pornography to child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, prostitution, sexual violence. All of these things are really interconnected. And so we realize that if we want to solve one of these issues, we can't just try to solve that

issue in a vacuum. We have to see this kind of larger web. So that's our central thesis. And then we work in really three umbrellas. We do policy advocacy that's both legal slash governmental and also with corporations. And then we also do public education and we lead a coalition of around 300 plus other organizations, just helping everyone to cross-pollinate and hopefully create a stronger movement to end sexual exploitation. So I think a lot, largely in part to what you all do, there's been such an increased conversation lately about pornography and how it is a public health crisis. Would you qualify this as a public health crisis as an epidemic and why? Yes, absolutely.

In fact, actually, at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, we drafted model legislation for a state resolution declaring pornography a public health crisis. And that resolution has now been passed in 15 different states. And it's fantastic. The version that we drafted has footnotes for every single sentence in the entire resolution. So we believe it's very founded in the research to call this a public health crisis. crisis. One reason is that it's a public health crisis because it's something that impacts individuals and families beyond their capacity alone to correct. So you can be the most in-touch

parent, reading all of the blogs, putting on all of the parental controls, talking to your kids about the harms of pornography, and you cannot stop your child from being exposed to pornography and from potentially becoming a regular user of pornography. So it's this very massive problem, and it also has very real patent effects. Since 2011, there have been 40 peer-reviewed studies that showed pornography has negative and detrimental impacts on the brain. Even like it shrinks regions of the brain associated with motivation and decision-making. It's highly linked with sexual violence. There is a meta-analysis of 46 different studies, and it found that clearly and consistently

pornography is linked to increased risk for committing sexual offenses and accepting rape myth. It's linked also to even problems with sexual function. Back in the 1940s, men who struggled with the rectile this function below the age of 40 was around 1%. And since the boom of the internet, the boom of internet pornography, it's around 25% of men under the age of 40 struggling with it. And that's typically because, you know, people's sexualities are getting wired to screens instead of people. And suddenly pornography is becoming more arousing than a rowing. real-life partner. So, I mean, I could go on and on about the research and actually on our website at end sexual exploitation.org slash public health. We have an entire research summary that has

over, that has around 100 peer-reviewed studies in it so people can go and look up the research themselves. But the research is really clear that this has public health harms. And so we think it's important for us as a society and for our states to recognize that. You mentioned the statistic about 25% of men under the age of 40 having sexual function issues, how aware do you think American society is on this issue? I mean, that's a huge number. How aware are we and how can we change that? Because I have a feeling we're probably not as aware as we should be. Yeah, definitely not as aware as we should be. What's interesting is that there are several new, like ED medical companies that are starting to come out that are really targeting their ads

towards young men, which is kind of fascinating. You know, it's not the guy with the gray hair sitting in the bathtub. It's now they're saying, hey, you can be a 20-year-old and need our medication. So it's kind of interesting. I think that in the pharmaceutical industry, they're recognizing that it's a problem more than we are recognizing it culturally. I don't, I think if you ask the average 20, 25-year-old guy, if he knows that, this is a risk of his pornography use, he would not have any idea.

That's really, really scary. How would you say children are being unwillingly exposed pornography, and what are the effects on children? Yeah, they, I mean, they absolutely are. There was a study that kids right now who are in university, 93% of the boys and 62% of the girls have been exposed during adolescence, often before puberty. I think often we think about this as a male issue, and while it's certainly still dominate, mostly male issue. It's definitely impacting young girls, like 25% of girls under the

age of 25 have struggled with it in some form as well. So it's a human issue because of the internet. And kids are definitely being unintentionally exposed. I know kids who are exposed playing age-appropriate video games online. I know kids who were exposed in school, on the school gave them a iPad or a laptop and didn't put any filters on it. And so the kid got exposed to pornography in school on a school sanction device. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a mom right into our office because her young boy had been doing a fifth grade school project on slavery. And so he did the simple Google search of just the word bondage, thinking that he would learn about the chains and the ropes used in slavery and in 0.2 seconds flat was exposed to really violent pornography,

like in the thumbnail image showing extremely graphic things that I don't want your viewers to have to listen to. So this is the kind of world that kids live in now where if they're going to find it unintentionally and so I think that it's really important for us to be aware of that and to know that it does have really serious impacts on adolescent development. Like this is a how they're learning about sex. And that's a big problem because most pornography shows violence against women. And a recent study showed that 90% of the time, the women are responding to that violence with pleasure. So if this is the new sexual education, that's teaching that no means yes, and that violence is sexy. And I think that, you know, especially after the Me Too movement,

we can see the damage of those ideas, let alone, as I already said, there's so much research on the impact on the brain. Just think how more impactful that is on a developing brain impacts on sexual function. Think how much more impactful that is on a young person who's often being exposed to pornography before they've had their first kiss, right, before they actually even know how to interact, read body language with the real person. Yeah, so it's kind of grim out there. It's sobering.

How aware do you think parents are that their children are being groomed for sexual exploitation and what can parents do? You mentioned the mom that wrote in or called in and said that her fifth grade student had come across those images when he was looking for information on slavery and bondage. How can parents become more aware that this is a problem and their children like you said are being groomed for sexual exploitation? Yeah. Yeah, I would definitely say pornography in and of itself is grooming them for sexual abuse because it's normalizing typically violent themes. And so that in itself makes them more vulnerable to if an adult, a stranger, or another child advances on them. There's actually a strong link between pornography and a really disturbing issue called child-on-child sexual abuse.

Like one-third of children being sexually abused these days are typically being abused by another minor or another child. And those children or minors are 3.3 times more likely to act out and sexually harm another child if they've been exposed to pornography. because they're acting out what they see. So that's absolutely an issue. I think another thing that parents need to be aware of is the fact that in the age of social media, children are far more vulnerable to grooming for sexual abuse or sex trafficking than ever before, right?

Like if you were at sex trafficker 10, 20 years ago, you'd try to find someone in the mall or you tried to, like, catch them and start a relationship with them when they're walking home, like, from the bus or something. But now they can anonymously reach out to almost limitless kids with a few clicks of a button. And this isn't like a hypothetical. A couple of weeks ago, actually a couple months ago, I met with three young girls, 14, 15 years old in Washington, D.C., who were sex trafficking survivors. And I mean, like pause and think about that.

To be a sex trafficking survivor at the age of 14 and 15 is really traumatic. And they started showing me their Instagram accounts. and their Instagram accounts were set to private. So everyone thinks that's private, right? But no, they were still getting about a dozen or so messages from adult strangers, men, messaging them and able to message them, even though their accounts were set to private. Asking for nudes, sending nude photos of themselves, asking to meet up, asking, you know, just telling them that they were beautiful, sometimes trying to start a relationship with them, make them feel comfortable like you're their online boyfriend. And these girls just started sharing with us about how men are just able to reach out to kids on Instagram, even if their privacy settings are set to private.

And it's absolutely a way that they groom them. Sometimes, you know, they take the Romeo Pimp approach where they make them feel like they're in a relationship and then escalate abuse and manipulation into trafficking later on. Sometimes they, particularly with young girls, sometimes with young boys, will really coerce and push them to send a nude image to them. And then once they have that, they use that to blackmail or to sexually extort them into sex trafficking. So this is a really big issue that parents really need to be aware of.

You need to talk to your kids about their online experiences, not like about the danger of talking to strangers online, but also the importance of being able to say no to friend requests or the importance of being able to say no if strangers or people start making you feel uncomfortable because very often there are these surveys of kids who said, well, this guy kept talking to me online and I didn't want to stop talking to him because that would be mean. Like kids just want to be nice. They don't realize the risks that are involved.

So I think talking to your kids about being really intentional with their digital media literacy is something that parents need to be aware of because it can absolutely escalate into whether that's, you know, child pornography, sexual abuse, all the way up to sex trafficking. You've mentioned some of the effects of how children are being groomed for this as kids over social media on the internet. Aside from the whole sexual function issue we discussed earlier, how is pornography having an impact on marriages across this country as well?

I feel like that's a huge discussion, too, that we aren't having. But what is the situation there? It's having a huge impact. So there have been a few different studies that say close to 50% of marriages that are ending in divorce site pornography among the reasons, you know, among the issues. There's a lot of research showing that, you know, if there's pornography use in a relationship, whether that's dating or whether that's married, that it absolutely increases dissatisfaction with your partner. it typically increases pressure on the female to act out or measure up to the pornography, and the male being dissatisfied in his partner. And some people think, oh, well, if someone is married and using pornography,

that's because they're already unsatisfied. But often that's not the case. Often people have been using it from a young age and they bring it into marriage and the pornography actually makes them more dissatisfied than they would have been without it. So this is something that's definitely really important. I was actually talking to a therapist who works with a lot of couples that kind of are in a conservative Christian college. And they graduate and they've saved sex for marriage, both partners. They get married and they aren't even able to actually consummate their marriage because the male didn't even know he had sexual function problems.

He didn't even know because he wasn't sexually acting out. but he had just wired his sexuality to the pixels on the screen so much. And the good news is that there is, you know, there's therapy out there for this. There are programs out there. I have many that I would recommend. And we actually on our website at endsexual exploitation.org slash resources have a very long list of everything from like anonymous help online to therapists. It's absolutely something that can be reversed, but you need to actually take proactive efforts towards it. We also on that page, and sexual exploitation.org slash resources, have a list of resources for

women or romantic partners of those who are struggling with pornography because that absolutely has an impact. Typically, it's like the wife or girlfriend. Sometimes it could be the man or the boyfriend or husband. That absolutely has a big impact on that romantic partner. psychologically, self-esteem, ability to trust. You know, it begins to create kind of a tidal wave of effects. And the good news is that there are resources out there for those individuals as well. You mentioned the resources and the importance of having those conversations.

How would you suggest even broaching that subject, having that conversation? I know we were talking actually earlier before we got started and we were talking about how I think for some people in a lot of society, I'd venture to say that, pornography addiction is harder to talk about than, for example, drug or alcohol abuse or other sorts of addiction. So how do you go about starting that conversation so it's not a problem down the road? Yeah, it is hard for people to talk about it. And I think it's that extra layer of shame because it involves sexuality and it's something that's very much hidden in the dark and just because our culture doesn't talk about it yet. So at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, that's one of

the things we're trying to create kind of like a broader title wave to bring this out into the open. As far as starting the conversation, I think one thing that's really helpful is internally just recognizing that this is a problem that impacts everyone. So it is going to come up. You are going to have to talk about it with romantic partners or with your kids or with your friends. It's going to come up. And so just be prepared for that. And then some good ways are you can say, hey, I just listened to the Daily Signal podcast and they talked about this subject. What do think about that or have you ever struggled with that or how should we talk to our kids about this issue? You can use things that are happening in the media to kind of segue into it, maybe a little

bit more naturally. And then again, I would encourage you to go to our website and just be a little bit comfortable talking about some of the facts, some of the research that there is out there. And I feel like that always helps people feel more confident talking about it. Speaking of how prevalent this is in society, I feel like there are a lot of spaces where people might not be aware of how pornography has a foothold. When it comes to video games, for example, I was reading about Grand Theft Auto a few weeks ago, and I would say that it has some arguably pornographic content

that people who play the game, they might not realize it, or they might be so conditioned to seeing it, maybe they're a user themselves. How, I mean, is that the case? Would you say that's the case? And then where are other spaces where you're seeing that happen,

where pornography is just being introduced and people aren't aware? Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought that up. and I'm glad that you brought the video games too. So at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, we have a project called the Dirty Dozen List.com. And we name 12 mainstream facilitators of sexual exploitation. Every year we name a new 12.

And because it's true, there are mainstream ways and groups that are very much normalizing and promoting this, video game industry being one, steam is on our Dirty Desson list. Steam is basically like the Walmart for PC gamers. You go on there, you buy the games. They used to have about 700 games with sexual content, nudity. And then they came out with this video game called House Party,

where the entire theme is to walk into the house and you have sex with all the different girls. And you get them to have sex with you by getting them drunk or like blackmailing them. Horrible, horrible game. So we raised awareness about it and Steam like started to take the game off. But then all of the gamers were saying, oh, you're censoring, you're censoring. And so then Steam like because of the gamer backlash said, okay, we're going to have no rules. And now, so they went from 700 some games.

Now they have like over 2,000 games with sexual content and nudity. And really this like collision between pornography and video. games is absolutely happening in real time right now because graphics are getting better. And so that's something that's really concerning. And so they're on our dirty dozen list. Something else is like Amazon.com. They have sex stalls on Amazon.com. Like even ones with varied childlike features.

Obviously, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, pornography, and other forms of sexual exploitation are absolutely happening on those. So there are really so many different ways that this is seeping into our culture. And that's why we made the dirty dozen list. And that's the primary work that I do is our corporate advocacy. Because we realize that these companies are having an impact on our culture. Like when Google doesn't fix the search results so that a child searching just the term bondage immediately turns up hardcore pornography, if Google with a simple switch,

they could have prevented that from happening to that kid. It's probably happening to more kids now as we speak. So these corporate policies have a massive impact on society. And so at dirty dozen list.com, you can actually take action. And so you can sign petitions. You can send emails to executives. You can be part of social media campaigns. And the cool thing about it is that this actually works.

So as the result of the Dirty Dousen List, we've gotten Hilton hotels, Hyatt Hotels, Starwood, and Intercontinent. mental hotels group to stop selling on-demand pornography in their hotels. That impacts two million hotel rooms around the world and is a big chunk of money out of the pornography industry's budget, which I like. But it also is meaningful because I recently met with the sex trafficking survivor who said when she was trafficked, she'd be frequently trafficked in one of those hotel chains. And the men would frequently order pornography and make her act it out.

And she said the first time when she went in and realized that they were no longer selling pornography, she felt like maybe there was hope and like maybe there were people out there who cared about women like her. So this has, you know, a massive cultural impact, but also a really personal one. And similarly, we got Army, Air Force, and Navy to stop selling pornography on on their bases. Like, they should have been doing that. Think of the sexual violence problem we have in the military and yet they were feeding it by selling it on their bases. We got Google to stop linking ads to pornography or pornographic content. So these are all, and there's so many more victories that I could just talk about.

I could fill up a lot of time just talking about that. But I think it's important to let people know that there's actually a lot of hope. We actually do have some power to push back against how pervasive pornography is become in our culture today. Going from how pervasive it is to day-to-day interactions, conversations, couples have, what is the first step in this kind of a conversation? Maybe there's someone with an addiction, a spouse, a boyfriend, girlfriend, what is the first step in addressing that and getting recovery? What does that look like?

Yeah, I would say, first of all, address with empathy and compassion and not an intent to shame. It could be something that's very hurtful to you if you're in the relationship with the person, and that's valid. At the same time, a lot of the times people have been. exposed as children, and it's something that they've grown up struggling with. So it's important to try to have some level of compassion, or if you yourself are just very hurt, try to bring in a third party who can maybe help with that. So start with compassion and to know that resources are available. And again, and sexual exploitation.org slash resources, you know, you can get someone

to counseling. You can get someone onto an anonymous online. There are really great anonymous online tools, if they don't want to have to talk to someone face to face, just let them know that resources are available because this is something that's so little talked about and has such a big impact and people feel ashamed and people feel like there's no hope or people feel like this is something I've struggled with. It just will be something I've struggled with. So letting them know that there is light at the end of the tunnel. So many people have saved marriages, have recovered sexual function, have rewired the way that they view women. And and that's something that's very available.

Well, Haley, thank you so much for being with us today to discuss this topic. That's incredibly important to discuss, but sometimes hard to talk about. So thank you for being with us. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google, Play, or PIPAA. And please leave us a review or a five-star rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow.

The Daily Signal podcast is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Lauren Evans and Thalia Ramprasad. For more information, visitdailysignal.com.