From Porn to Crime: A straight line





I listened thoughtfully to their appeal for money. I looked at the young women recently freed from the sex trade—their eyes told a story of pain, shame, and a rough journey to their newfound freedom. I don’t doubt their misery, but the solution to free others isn’t just money—it goes much further.

 We need to connect the dots.





His image popped up on my Facebook newsfeed. I struggled to recognize him. But as my former
schoolmates posted, he’d once shared our classrooms. I stared at his jail mug shot. How had his journey taken him from an ordinary kid in high school to a Level Three sex offender?

One word. Porn.

Back in my childhood, porn was covered and shelved behind the check out counter.  Gradually, it came out from behind the brown paper coverings and earned its “rightful” place with the rest of the periodicals for sale. Even the public library had copies for interested readers.

Now, it’s freely accessible online.

But the dark side of porn is well documented. Like an addictive drug, it triggers the pleasure centers of the brain into releasing intoxicating chemicals. Problem? Like any addiction, more is needed next time. 

This isn’t meant to condemn porn users, but recognizing that porn is destroying lives, like the kid from my high school days—and all the lives he’s cruelly harmed to get his fix.

Across college campuses, there are frequent rallies to fight sex trafficking, but when 87% of college males and 31% of college females are porn users they aren’t helping the victims, they are perpetuating the problem. 

We can’t be activists against sex trafficking and porn users simultaneously.


Sex traffickers are raking in money from porn addicts and profiting on the plight of those they've enslaved for their illicit business. 

While we can see the jailhouse mug shots and listen forlornly to the stories of the abused, we aren’t really helping the victims trapped in bondage until we confront pornography and what it has done.






If one dot is sexual abuse and another dot is sex trafficking, porn is the line connecting those dots. 

Until we see that line we won’t get any closer to helping those who are its innocent victims.

Statistics from Brigham Young University study 2008

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