The Truth About Pornography and the Importance of Changing the Buyer’s Heart
In the fight against sex trafficking, it is critical to focus on serving those being sexually exploited, but there is another group involved in the equation who must also be addressed in order for real change to be made - the buyers.
When we ask the question, “why does sex trafficking exist in the first place?” the answer is clear: sex trafficking exists because the demand for it exists.
What this means is that there are countless buyers in our communities creating this demand, and there are countless women, men and children being exploited in order to meet this demand. In order to fully fight the problem of sex trafficking, we need to focus on both sides of the equation - helping the survivors and changing the hearts of the buyers.
We recently had the opportunity to talk with Joe Madison, Executive Director of Demand Disruption, and get his take on why it’s so crucial to work with the buyers to address what brought them there in the first place, change their hearts, and disrupt the demand for sex trafficking all together.
Demand Disruption reduces the demand for sex trafficking by working directly *“with law enforcement agencies and people who have been arrested for purchasing sex to support and heal on both sides of the equation.”
Why is reducing demand so important? If the demand for sex trafficking ceases to exist, then sex trafficking can’t exist. Therefore, instead of simply arresting buyers, we must also work with them to change their hearts so they will never engage in that activity again.
According to Madison, when most people think of buyers, they first think, “they’re predators, we have to put them in jail.” To this, Madison said yes, but if they aren’t also receiving rehabilitation, then they aren’t going to learn what triggered them to make that decision, and their behavior won’t change.
“If we are truly serious about fighting trafficking, we’ve got to support survivors, the way Rescue America does, and we have to understand that stopping buying behavior is the most direct way to stop human trafficking,” Madison said.
Although sex trafficking is an illicit business, it is still a business, operating based on the principles of supply and demand. According to Madison, one of the primary ways to end trafficking is to break up its business model.
“In any business model, if you don’t have demand, there is no supply,” he said. “That sounds crass probably and sort of fundamental when we’re talking about human beings, but sadly we’ve got to understand how traffickers look at it. We’ve got to understand how this market works.”
Demand Disruption takes a strategic approach to breaking up the business model of sex trafficking by specifically looking at buyer behavior. They ask questions like “how did that buyer get there?” By understanding how the buyer got to that place of buying sex, they are then able to find points of intercession where they can work with young people to prevent them from ever becoming buyers due to what our culture tells them is okay, while also working with existing buyers to rehabilitate them so they will never buy again, Madison said.
“That is the fundamental goal of Demand Disruption: we’re either going to change the buyer’s heart, or we’re going to be a barrier between that buyer and the exploited,” Madison said.
In answer to the question of how the buyer got to the place of buying sex in the first place - the road there often begins with pornography. *“Nearly everyone who has purchased sex is a frequent porn user,” their website states. “Based on the science, we know that porn affects the brain like a hard drug and is often a part of the escalation dynamic that leads to participating in sex trafficking.”
Madison was able to create the “escalation dynamic” through interviewing hundreds of buyers at the point of arrest. While there are no excuses for the decisions they’ve made, he said, it’s clear to see that these men didn’t just wake up one day and decide to purchase sex; they made these decisions based on a continuum, their own escalations.
When talking with men in Demand Disruption’s STAR program, an extended rehabilitation program for buyers, “there is an overwhelming majority - I would say over 85% of these men who are in our program or we’ve met at the point of arrest either have a porn addiction or pornography has been a part of their history in a significant way,” Madison said.
Understanding the timeline of exposure and the dangerous progression it leads to provides insight into how buyers got to that place while also revealing the points of intercession that can make a change in the younger generation.
The average age of exposure to pornography is 9 years old, and the effects of this can be incredibly damaging.
“Imagine a boy and a girl seeing this violent, aggressive, power-imbalanced representation of sex, and they think, ‘I guess this is what I’m supposed to be as the boy in the relationship.’ Or a girl says, ‘I guess this is what I should expect in a relationship.’ That’s heartbreaking,” Madison said. “But it’s also indicative of what’s going to happen when they’re 13 and get a smartphone, what’s going to happen when they’re 15 and 16 and either find themselves in an unhealthy relationship or they’re the perpetrator of an unhealthy relationship because they’re acting on these things they think it is to be a man or a woman.”
Madison also pointed out how many who are exposed to pornography don’t understand what it is or that by clicking on pornography, they are entering a sale cycle. What starts as watching a video can lead to clicking a pop-up link to a webcam, taking them from a video to a live person; “there’s the escalation,” Madison said. “It’s more money, it’s more revenue.”
This escalation can create a deeper and deeper compulsion in someone, making them a customer for life. For some, the videos and the webcams become not enough, answering the question of why people buy sex: they just went from them and a video, to them and a person, and now they want to experience it, Madison said.
“And guess what’s on that website?” asked Madison. “A link to find local girls….It takes [them] to escort services,” he said. “Every man I talk to at the point of arrest, he ended up there because he was on a website, and he saw what he thought was a real ad, but it was a fake ad from law enforcement, and he responded to it.”
What people need to understand is that pornography is the start of a highly compulsive sale cycle that continues to draw people to take the next step, to act out, and to escalate, Madison shared.
“That’s why we believe we can change the buyer’s heart - because we can get into that, we can show them that truth and we can do it in a way where we’re connecting them to resources,” Madison said. “It’s not enough to realize it. You’ve got to have support groups, you’ve got to have information that’s accurate and true about women and about these industries and about these outlets; you have to have professional therapy, and you have to have accountability, and those are all the things that we try to plug men into so they never buy again.”
Because of the harm pornography leads to, Demand Disruption believes a big next step in fighting this side of the problem is declaring porn a public health hazard. Madison compares the current lack of the public’s understanding of the dangers of porn to the curve society was on with cigarettes in the 60s:
“We had one cardiologist after another, one pulmonologist after another saying this is causing problems smoking this item and it going into our body, but the industry, the nation wasn’t ready to acknowledge that because there was so much money involved among other things,” he said. “We’re on sort of that same curve with pornography. We’ve got to understand this is a catalyst; pornography is human trafficking’s greatest commercial.”
To get the word out, Demand Disruption launched Hazardousmaterial.org, sharing about the cause and effect of pornography and its consequences. “When we realize [those], we can really start to fundamentally acknowledge this at a state level so more research and more understanding can come from that,” said Madison.
We are incredibly thankful to partner with Demand Disruption and support the essential work they are doing to change buyer behavior and address and confront pornography’s direct correlation with sex trafficking. To learn more about their work in this area, visit DemandDisruption.org
*DemandDisruption.org
