Project Overview

In 2008 the Witherspoon Institute has launched a two-year project on the Social Costs of Pornography under the aegis of its Marriage, Family, and Democracy Program. The project consists of two parts: A) a study meeting to gather the most up-to-date research on the subject; B) and the publication of the findings of the study meeting in two forms: a book of the papers presented, and a position document.

The purpose of the project was three-fold: 1) to establish the social costs of pornography; 2) to increase public awareness of these costs; and 3) to encourage public policy.

Pornography comes in many kinds, and with varying degrees of realism. Today's pornography, however, is increasingly of the hard-core variety, meaning the presentation, through moving images, of real sexual acts, in which the focus of attention is on the sexual organs of the participants, male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, adult or child. The sale of pornography over the Internet is now thought to be a billion-dollar industry in America, and the decision of the Supreme Court to protect it as free speech means that America is identified across the world as the heart of the pornographic culture, a fact not unconnected with the growing anti-Americanism of Islamic countries. A few futile attempts are made to protect children, but these attempts cannot withstand the tide of permissiveness. In a culture in which pornography is permitted to flourish, and is, indeed, sold in respectable shops and marketed by respectable hotel chains, children cannot be insulated even from its direct effects, much less its indirect ones.