Exploitation on the Homefront

Friends, peace be with you.

As we begin our Advent journey, a journey that starts with one lone candle lit in the darkest part of the year, I’d like to talk about a very dark subject that is not something to talk about with my little friends.

If you haven’t yet seen the movie Sound of Freedom, I encourage you to do so, with the warning that it brings up some very adult and challenging themes. If you have seen it, you know what those themes are and can probably understand why I’m talking about this in a bulletin column and not “from the pulpit”. I’m praying about whether the Holy Spirit wants us to show this movie at the parish so we could discuss it. On the one hand, I feel like it brings up subjects that demand attention and conversation but, on the other hand, I feel like it’s not a subject that a kid should be worried about. Most kids are not going to ever be sold into sex slavery, let alone being approached by someone who offers to give them money for modeling who abducts them into a life of sex slavery. I wouldn’t want to give kids nightmares that make them afraid and I wouldn’t want adults to believe it’s just a “third world” problem.

But I do believe it’s something we need to talk about, in part because I suspect there was a theme of the movie that was left unaddressed. The movie seems to point to the ultra-rich as being the main source of child sex trafficking, which is undoubtedly true. Indeed, I would be a fool to contest this conclusion considering it’s coming from the man who rescued kids from these servants of satan’s darkness.

But, I wonder if there’s sometime more common that is a cause as well, namely the pornography industry. The internet is saturated with pornography and there is a growing attitude among a lot of people that viewing pornography is normal and healthy. Movies and television shows no longer joke about the kid caught looking at dirty pictures in books or magazines as though the person should feel shame. Nowadays, the attitude tends to be that this kind of curiosity is normal and it’s even encouraged by some people as a healthy exploration of sexuality.

Except it isn’t healthy because it portrays sex and sexuality in unrealistic and, often, extremely unhealthy ways. I could spend multiple bulletin columns on this phenomenon alone but, suffice it to say, it is affecting people’s sexual performance (or lack thereof) because of unrealistic expectations about physical characteristics and abilities.

But, aside from that, where do they get the “actors” in these films? I would suspect a certain percentage come from the pipeline of people trapped from childhood in sexual slavery.

When men (and it is a larger issue for men, though it can be for women as well) come to me to ask for help with addiction to pornography, I encourage them to think about the actor as their sister or brother or their daughter or son or their niece or nephew. I encourage them to look at the bruises and cuts the person has to see the brokenness and humanity that is often lost when we just pay attention to the sexual organs. Sometimes this helps them to turn the video off before things go down the path where dopamine has basically made it impossible to stop. I wonder if people thought they were contributing to child sexual exploitation, that the “actress” or “actor” they are looking at was trapped as a child and has been exploited ever since, that, by clicking on that link and watching the video, you may be contributing to child sexual exploitation. Would it stop more people from watching these videos? Would it help clarify to our culture why they are so destructive?

I know they are making a second part to this movie and I kind of hope they go deeper and don’t just pin the problem on a cabal of evil rich people. I have a sense that the problem is much more local than that.