The On-Line Obscenity Problem
-- An Overview

By PATRICK McGRATH
Director of Media Relations, Morality in Media, Inc.

A proper review of the problem of on-line obscenity requires an examination of the scope of the problem, the damage that it causes, how it became that way, and what can be done to reduce it. Therefore, this article is divided into four parts:

I. How big is it?
II. What damage does it cause?
III. How did it get that way?
IV. What can be done about it?

How big is on-line obscenity?

Given the constant change that defines the Internet, you can't answer the question, "How big is the on-line porn business?", in the same way you can answer, "How big is the Empire State Building?" It changes too much, and too quickly. The best estimate you can make is a "snapshot" that may not hold true months, weeks, or even days down the road.

Nevertheless, given some reasonably good "snapshots," this much can be said: the on-line porn business is very big and growing.

Here's a quick snapshot: a market analysis company said in a May 1999 Reuters news item on ZDNet that the "near-$1 billion sex-on-the-Web industry is set to triple within five years."

Here's another: the U.S. News and World Report cover story (27 March 2000) on the on-line pornography business, entitled A Lust for Profits, includes the following quotes:

"With the dot-comming of America near complete, salacious fare remains a huge--and growing--cyberspace draw. According to Nielsen NetRatings, 17.5 million surfers visited porn sites from their homes in January [2000]. . .The top E-porn site . . . boasted more unique visitors in January than ESPN.com, CDNOW, or barnesandnoble.com."

" . . .E-porn is also a massive moneymaker. While behemoths like Amazon.com and eToys struggle with losses running into eight figures, adult-entertainment companies . . . are flush with profits. 'A large, mainstream E-commerce company needs to go out of its way to create demand, [to] explain why it is important," says Keith Condon, vice president of Atlas Multimedia, whose holdings include [a prominent porn Web site]. "We don't. We work on filling demand that's already there."

" . . . With low advertising and labor costs, adult sites typically enjoy profit margins of 30 percent or more. Online brokerages, among the few Internet ventures to rival adult sites in popularity, are far less lucrative; the 1998 profit margin for Ameritrade, for example, was just 0.2 percent."

" . . . In the early to mid-1990s, up to 80 percent of all Internet traffic was adult related, and service providers smelled money. [A chief operating officer for a Florida-based ISP] notes that his company was not created to cater to adult clients. 'But it went that direction because of demand,' he says."

" . . . Adult material accounts for 69 percent of the $1.4 billion pay-to-view online-content market, far outpacing video games (4 percent) and sports (less than 2 percent)."

Here's a third snapshot: a Forbes magazine story (14 June 1999) entitled Porn Goes Public (access requires Forbes.com subscription):

"Pornography to the tune of $1 billion already flows over the Internet, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass. Behind those figures are [big porn Web sites] and some 40,000 individually run operations. . . "

"It's hard to tell how big these Web pornographers really are, because they often stand behind hundreds of seemingly different sites. Senior analyst Mark Hardie at Forrester thinks the biggest porn sites have sales between $100 million and $150 million. We can't confirm that, but we were able to find several companies . . . with revenues in the $55 million region. The Internet is a gold mine for pornographers. . . "

What damage does on-line obscenity cause?

Under this heading, we refer to the damages to potentially millions of individuals -- men, women, children, and their families -- all over the world.

If the on-line porn trade is gigantic, the spiritual and psychic damages it causes are at least as gigantic.

Dr. Victor Cline, author of the monograph Pornography's Effects on Adults and Children, who has, as a clinical psychologist, treated more than 300 persons -- 96 percent male -- with sexual illnesses, calls the Internet "the leading source of pornographic materials worldwide," and states:

"Some of my porn addict patients inform me that the Internet has three major advantages in feeding their addictive sexual illnesses. They call them the three A's: It's easily Accessible, Affordable, and Anonymous.

"I have had boys in their early teens getting into this wasteland with really disastrous consequences. They told me they actively search for porn on the Internet, keying in such words as sex, nudity, pornography, obscenity, etc. Then, once they have found how to access it they go back to it again and again, just like porn addicts." (From 'Pornography's Effects on Adults and Children,' 2001 edition, published by Morality in Media)

Pornography addiction spares no income level, no social class, no economic group. "Most of my patients are CEOs or doctors or attorneys or priests," sex addiction therapist Patrick J. Carnes told Fortune magazine (10 May 1999). Carnes told the magazine he treated four Fortune 500 chief executives in 1998. Fortune reporter Betsy Morris also reported:

"A 42-year old television producer in the Dallas area says he nearly sabotaged his career three years ago when he began using the Internet. . . . when he began to surf porn sites on the Web, it consumed him. Before long he found that instead of working on his documentaries, he was locking the door of his home office (so his wife wouldn't catch him) and spent seven hours of his ten-hour workday downloading porn . . . 'My work was getting very, very stacked up. I lost prestigious jobs because of it,' he says. It was to the point of paralyzing my business.' "

An article in U.S. News & World Report's cover story The Dark Side of the Internet (28 August 2000) sketched one on-line porn addict:

"Whenever Kevin was home, he was online, with the door closed. A few times, he called her in to look at an especially 'wild' site. She was disgusted but didn't worry -- until he turned away from her in bed. 'Have you been looking again?' she would cry.

"By January, Kevin knew he had a serious problem. He promised to go cold turkey, never even logging on to the computer at home. But there was still the machine at the hospital. Every night, he would use his master key to get into the closed library and indulge his addiction as never before. Sometimes, for his entire eight-hour shift, he would sit transfixed in front of the screen's glowing sex world. When his bosses asked him to look in on the library, where some 'unusual' computer activity had been noticed, he laid low for a month, then headed straight back to the same spot.

"This time, though, he walked into a trap. Earlier this summer, the hospital installed cameras and software that recorded Kevin's every mouse click. On June 27, the administrators confronted him. Because he had a stellar work record, they suspended him for only three days and ordered him into counseling. Kevin now lives under the constant monitoring of his wife and his boss. 'I think I can make it,' he says. 'But if [my wife] goes, I know I'll head straight back to that computer.'

Even clergymen have been falling into the tar pit of Internet porn addiction.

The Calgary Herald reported recently (14 July 2001) on "the silent mistress that's always there for some pastors" -- namely, 'Netporn. Herald religion writer Joe Woodward writes:

" 'My dad introduced me to Playboy at the age of seven,' says a former pastor, speaking anonymously. . . . 'Once I got on the Internet, I'd be on the Web three hours a day -- that's a low estimate. How much time I'd spend depended only on (preserving) my secrecy, whether the secretary or my wife was in the office . . . What haunts me now more than anything is the time I've wasted, all the hours I've spent in front of the computer, time I could have shared.'

"What is undeniable is that the ease, the volume, and most importantly, the secrecy of the new Internet pornography has turned a common disease into a full-scale epidemic.

" . . . 'I'd guess at least 50 percent of the pastor struggle with pornography -- at least 50 percent,' says Christian therapist Wes Fehr, who counsels pastors in Calgary.

" 'It's a huge problem. It's amazing how many souls are in bondage.

" 'Who do they turn to? Who do they tell? We're dealing with men who have caring hearts. They're accustomed to giving and giving. But often they're wounded themselves, and they haven't worked on healing themselves. They feel they can't talk it out with their wives. And because of their positions, going public just isn't an option.'"

A recent article on the Christian Web site CrossWalk.com (20 July 2001) was entitled, "Pornography Addiction: A Stronghold Inside Church Walls Too." One Ohio associate pastor was reported to have "not only pornographic magazines, but a number of adult videos, a selection of carefully selected Web sites and a membership with a phone sex club."

Furthermore, CrossWalk.com notes, "He is not alone. Focus on the Family says one out of seven pastors who call its toll-free help line say they are addicted to pornography. Promise Keepers reports that one-third of the men who attended PK rallies in 1996 admitted to a personal struggle with pornography."

Another sub-set of the on-line porn problem is The Library Problem -- that is, obscene materials being accessed through Internet connections on public and school library computers. Organizations like Family Friendly Libraries and Web sites like FilteringFacts.org (which is now in hibernation) specialized in documenting the immense downloading of porn in public libraries, and pointed out that the private professional organization for librarians -- the American Library Association -- adamantly opposed software filtering for public library terminals.

Filtering Facts and the Family Research Council jointly published a study in 2001 entitled Dangerous Access that, using hundreds of incident reports from public libraries, demonstrated that "library online-services are being used by adults and children to access illegal pornography, often with full knowledge of library staff, some of whom have refused to call police."

How did the on-line obscenity problem get this way?

Now for the big surprise: Distributing obscene material (photographs, motion pictures, illustrations, computer generated images, etc.) on the Internet -- is A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.

We have a fuller discussion of obscenity laws and the Internet elsewhere on our Web site. But here's a quick summary: Sections 1462 and 1465 of Title 18, United States Code, forbid distribution of obscene material by, among other things, an "interactive computer service."

Furthermore, "dealing in obscene matter" is also a predicate offense under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.

So what happened? Briefly, the Internet exploded on the scene during the term of Bill Clinton in the White House and Janet Reno at the Department of Justice.

During that eight year period, the number of prosecutions under the Federal obscenity statutes declined more than eighty percent.

Morality in Media has published a number of articles on the lack of obscenity enforcement during the Clinton Administration. Rather than go into exhaustive detail here, we will present one table of statistics.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University collects data from the U.S. Justice Department and processes them into useful statistics. Over the years, Morality in Media has asked TRAC, "How many obscenity cases have been processed by the U.S. Justice Department?" These are the numbers:

Number of prosecutions, convictions, criminal referrals, and U.S. Attorneys' declinations, with lead charges as violations of 18 USC 1460-1468 (Federal obscenity laws)
FY 1992 through FY 2001

Prosecutions means cases in which the lead charge was under one of the obscenity sections, Sections 1460-1468 of Title 18 of the United States Code. Convictions means guilty pleas or jury convictions for violations of Sections 1460-1468. Referrals mean criminal referrals from federal law enforcement agencies to U.S. Attorneys' offices for the purpose of initiation of prosecution. Declinations are refusals to initiate prosecutions based on referrals from federal law enforcement agencies.

Keep in mind that there are 93 U.S. Attorneys' offices throughout the United States (including the territories), one in each Federal judicial district. Also remember that distributing obscene material (e.g., photographs, magazines, films, videos, DVDs, audio messages, etc.) is illegal through the mails; by means of TV, telephone and the Internet; by means of truck, airplane, etc. in interstate commerce; or in foreign commerce.