By: Lexie LaVallee
rape, Porn, and Trafficking
If you haven’t read my story, it would help for you to know that I was trafficked as a child. Do you know how buyers found me?
Porn.
The advertisement for the sale of my body was through a video of me being raped. That was during the dawn of the internet and the beginning of porn sites. Now, there is an unbelievably wide variety of porn thanks to the disease of addiction, which gives viewers new cravings to get high again.
It’s a common belief that porn is victimless. Most people believe that porn actors are well paid and everyone on set knows what they’re getting into.
But that is far from reality. That image of pornography just allows us to justify consuming porn.
I have friends who have been in porn. Some by choice, but most against their will.
For those who have done it by choice, they found themselves being manipulated into doing things by the producer that was not in their contract. Things they did not want to do, hadn’t agreed to, and things that often times physically hurt them. If they didn’t do everything they were told to, they didn’t get paid. Force, fraud, and coercion are the elements that define sex trafficking. More often than not, the making of porn interacts with these elements, which means the porn that so many people enjoy is often sex trafficking at its core.
Do you really think that the millions of people who consume violent porn ever thought they would grow up to have that addiction? Neither did those who now purchase others for sex.
Your harmless habit of porn-watching will take you places you never thought you would go, if it hasn’t already.
The Psychology of Buyers
I have studied the thoughts and behavior of men who purchase sex. They all have one thing in common, porn use. Victor Malarek wrote a research book on the men who purchase sex called The Johns. Over and over these men site porn as what inspired them to purchase sex. They reported how watching online-porn eventually wasn’t enough and they found themselves looking for the real thing.
They never intended for it to go that far. The truth is, porn stretches your boundaries and breaks into other areas of your life.
Unless you and I take a bold stand against not just sex trafficking but the fuel behind it, porn, we will never see an end to the millions enslaved all over the globe.
Your thoughts and actions have a global impact because you are an influencer everywhere you go. But your thoughts and actions can contribute to the solution instead of fueling the problem.
Let’s say you have 5 guys in your life right now. If you stand with them and help them to walk away from a lifestyle that accepts the lust and immortality of pornography and then you show them how to go on to do the same for 5 men in their life, your investment just went from 5 to 25. Imagine if you did that every year. The fruit would be unimaginable — from individuals, to marriages, to families, to communities.
But it first starts with you.
How Can Ending Porn Stop Sex Trafficking?
Let’s push this further.
You could help take hundreds of thousands of buyers off of the sex trade market not just in the US but the throughout the world.
Thousands of Americans are frequent fliers to foreign countries where rape of children is legal. It’s called sex tourism, and it’s a booming multi-billion dollar industry affecting over 2 million children per year (1) (2).
This industry thrives off of each individual. And it is financially backed by the major porn industries.
Not only that, but the next generation of boys to follow the revelation of their fathers might live free of a mind tainted by porn. Sexual abuse rates can decrease and marriages can flourish! It’s possible.
Yes, sexual exploitation and abuse is a MASSIVE problem. It will never change if you and I keep going with the flow of culture and doing the same things that got us to that place. It’s time for a remnant to rise up, and I believe that will be you and I.
“But you are not like that, for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.”
1 Peter 2:9
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Lexie LaVallee is a coffee connoisseur and avid dog lover living in Nashville, TN. She has a degree in Psychology from Lee University and attends The Belonging Co. Church. Lexie has been fighting sex-trafficking for 6 years, partnering with non-profit organizations, to help people find redemption and live undefined by their circumstances. Click here to learn more about Lexie.
References
(1) Mahathi D. Kosuri & Elizabeth L. Jeglic (2016) Child sex tourism: American perceptions of foreign victims, Journal of Sexual Aggression, 23:2, 207-221, DOI: 10.1080/13552600.2016.1231350
(2) https://www.iamat.org/blog/implications-of-sexual-tourism/