Research Project:
The Social Costs of Pornography
Project Overview
Under the aegis of its Marriage, Family and
Democracy Program, the Witherspoon Institute is launching a two-year
project on the Social Costs of Pornography. The project will
consist of three parts: A) a Study Meeting to gather the most
up-to-date research on the subject; B) the Publication of the
findings of the study meeting in two forms: the proceedings of the
study meeting in a book, and a position document; and 3) Four
meetings to present the findings of the Study.
The purpose of the project is 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 is of many kinds, and of 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.