In mid-December, a group called the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking released its annual report for 2021. Established in 2015 under section 115 of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, the Council was formed to “provide advice and recommendations to the Senior Policy Operating Group established under… the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000… and the President’s Interagency  Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking.”

The statute that formed the Council also defined, to a great extent, its composition: “To the extent practicable, members of the Council shall be survivors of trafficking, who shall accurately reflect the diverse backgrounds of survivors of trafficking, including– (A) survivors of sex trafficking and survivors of labor trafficking; and (B) survivors who are United States citizens and survivors who are aliens lawfully present in the United States.”

What the statute didn’t require, but the Council appears to have done of its own volition, is the faithful repeating of talking points offered by anti-porn organizations who claim that the adult industry is a hotbed of human trafficking. (The statute also doesn’t require that five of the Council’s eleven members include a quote from the Bible in with their job titles and credentials, but that’s a whole other rant.)

The Techdirt article linked above lays out in detail the specific talking points to which I refer – a familiar set of assertions of flimsy foundation, if indeed they enjoy any foundation at all. The central, unmistakable theme of the claims is this: Porn encourages human trafficking and sex trafficking by virtue of its mere existence.

There’s nothing at all new about anti-porn organizations making this sort of claim about porn and the adult industry, of course. Nor is there anything unusual about politicians with a large base of socially conservative constituents repeating these sorts of claims. What is unusual, possibly even unique (at least in my recollection), is to see a report published by the U.S. State Department which echoes this sort of excessive, misleading rhetoric.

What the emphasis on porn in the Council’s report says to me is that groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) are starting to make inroads with the federal government that are similar to those they have established with multiple state governments. As the Council’s report itself notes, “(a)s of November 2020, 16 U.S. states have passed resolutions recognizing pornography as a public health issue.”

Citing that number, the Council then asserts that it is “time that the federal government also take deliberate action to acknowledge the direct links between pornography and human trafficking and address it as a threat to society and particularly to youth, minority, and LGBTQIA2S+ populations.”

Human trafficking is a serious problem, of this there is little doubt. Just how much human trafficking is taking place, on the other hand, is subject to great debate. The same can be said for sex trafficking, a category into which some people seem eager to place on every instance of an adult performer walking onto a movie set, possibly even every time they snap a naked selfie.

While I find the arguments made by the likes of NCOSE largely absurd, they and those who agree with them have every right to make those arguments. What I take issue with is presenting these arguments as well-accepted facts, then asking the federal government to take sweeping action based on those allegedly well-accepted facts. And make no mistake, what the Council has asked the government to do address the alleged “threat to society” presented by porn would be quite the sweeping action, indeed.

In the report, the Council “specifically recommend(s) HHS allocate resources to fund research on the public health harms of pornography and launch a comprehensive effort to abate the pervasive and disproportionate abuse of minority peoples that escalates, fetishizes, and normalizes racism. This effort should also address the correlation between pornography consumption and sexual violence, as well as the correlation between pornography use and sex buying behaviors.”

The Council also calls upon “federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and DOJ to prosecute federal obscenity laws actively, aggressively, and to the fullest extent of the law.” One wonders whether the Council fully appreciates what they’ve just asked federal law enforcement to undertake, not to mention the costs involved, but I certainly don’t doubt the sincerity of their request.

I’ve never been one to be too concerned about the rhetoric coming out of places like NCOSE, an organization formally known as Morality in Media. One reason I’ve never been too concerned about their rhetoric is that in the last few decades, in contrast to the sort of influence the group enjoyed in 1969, when its then-President, Father Morton Hill, was named member of the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, in recent years, the federal government has seemed more inclined to humor groups like NCOSE than to follow through with any sort of action.

What do I mean by merely humoring groups like NCOSE? Recall that as a candidate, Donald Trump pledged to direct the DOJ to vigorously prosecute obscenity crimes if he became President. Do you know how many federal obscenity prosecutions were initiated under the Trump Administration targeting adult pornography (as opposed to patently illegal child porn) during his four years in office? It’s a nice round figure: 0.

There’s a substantial chance this report from Advisory Council on Human Trafficking will be received much like Trump’s campaign pledge – which is to say someone from each of the relevant government agencies will look at the recommendations, tell the Council they will consider those recommendations, then shove the report into a drawer, never to be looked at again.

On the other hand, the fact the Council so faithfully repeated the NCOSE’s talking points could signal the regrowth of the organization’s influence.

“These comments demonstrate that NCOSE-generated narrative that pornography is linked to sex trafficking has taken hold with some elements the federal government,” attorney Larry Walters told YNOT when asked about the Council’s report. “This is a wakeup call to the adult industry and illustrates the urgent need to push back on these false claims with facts. There is also a critical need for academic study and research to debunk these claims, and this is something various groups are looking into presently.”

Personally, I’d like to invite HHS, DOJ and the other agencies called upon by the Council to investigate and prosecute members of the adult industry to consider whether any of the actions they’ve been asked to undertake will truly do anything to put a dent in human trafficking and/or sex trafficking, or if it’s possible that focusing their efforts on the adult industry will prove a counterproductive waste of time, money, resources and effort, within agencies that in many cases are already being stretched to the limit by the pandemic, whether their purview is public health, public safety or law enforcement.

So far as I’m aware, outside of the Council, no credible government agency or private sector entity that investigates, monitors, or reports on human trafficking has ever named the adult industry as a factor in the global problem of human trafficking. This suggests to me that to the extent any government agency follows the porn-related recommendations of the Council, it will merely be denying resources to other efforts that offer a far greater prospect of having a positive impact on the issue at hand.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels