Welcome to 2021! May this year be a productive and nourishing year for you all.
We have just moved back to East Maitland, where Bella has picked up the reigns of her retail coffee business, and we continue to care for her father. Bella's latest project is to convert an old construction site caravan into a mobile office so that our research work (and my many books!) can more easily move with us wherever we go.
During this year, I hope to publish two journal articles that document what the Freedom Keys Research Project has discovered so far. I'm also writing a book on mercy -- a foundational topic in our thinking about how to disrupt the driving forces behind human trafficking.
A Momentous Week for Online Porn
I wonder if you saw the news just before Christmas about a massive shake-up in the online pornography industry?
The porn industry is a major contributor to sex trafficking because it encourages people to coerce and abuse others for financial gain. Many porn web sites do not verify the ages of the people in the videos they host, nor the age of viewers. In most cases they do not verify that the people in the videos consented to being recorded or to having the recording made public. Consequently, there are many examples of rape videos and sexual activities with minors.
In December, pressure from the anti-human trafficking movement lead to Mastercard and Visa removing their merchant services from the biggest online porn company. This is not a conservative sexual agenda that seeks to end all pornography, though certainly there are voices calling for that too. The issue here is the prevalence of human coercion and abuse. It is not about sexual purity, but about violence, lack of consent, and sexual trauma imposed on children.
The porn company responded by removing all the videos that had been uploaded by unverified users, which amounted to more than 70% of their library.
That's a huge step in the right direction and will have ripple effects across the porn industry. For more details on those changes, including whether we can actually expect them to be effective, you can read my article here. If you'd to understand the challenges of cybersex, pornography, sexting, and the online sexual exploitation of children (OSEC) in more detail, I recommend a webinar on YouTube: The Cybersex Landscape.
Thanks for your continuing support. Please pass this email on to your friends and colleagues, and point them to our website.
—Matt and Bella