In healthcare, the phrase “no decision about me, without me” describes an approach that gives the patient a voice in decisions that are made about their care. This shared decision-making model ensures that the decisions of experts do not become detached from the needs and wishes of those they serve. 

The same philosophy is very far from the minds of those who make decisions about the distribution of adult content online. On April 14, Mastercard announced that it would no longer permit unmoderated adult content to be streamed at all on its customer websites, and that such sites would need to provide proof of the identity, age and consent of all performers. Two days later, Nicholas Kristof published an article in the New York Times claiming that mainstream adult content sites are profiting from rape videos by reason that abuse videos are sometimes uploaded to such sites in breach of their terms of service (a problem that also affects major social media sites).

What these and other recent incidents directed at adult content have in common is that sex workers and adult content creators weren’t consulted on them, despite their undeniable interest in this topic. This is not a new phenomenon. Just as their wisdom and lived experience was ignored when the law FOSTA/SESTA was passed on the pretext that the law would stop child sex trafficking, so too sex workers are treated as part of the problem of non-consensual imagery, rather than being recognized as part of its solution. Repeatedly, policymakers and the mainstream media treat sex workers as having no agency of their own, still less any expertise that could be brought to bear in addressing problems that affect their own community.

It is this exclusion of sex worker voices that enables anti-porn activists to elide the difference between consensual and non-consensual adult content, and to advance the false narrative that they are equivalent. For example Kristof’s article claims, without evidence, that “Many videos depict rapists, real or fake, forcing sex on children or adults who are trying to fight back.” Its tendency to collapse these rather vital distinctions—”real or fake”, “children or adults”—exposes the war on porn for the religious crusade that it really is.

The issue of non-consensual content being mixed in with legitimate 18+ adult content is a real one, even though the problem isn’t as widespread as Kristof makes out in his emotionally manipulative articles. Both adult-specific platforms such as Pornhub and general social media platforms such as Twitter have been lax in establishing standards to prevent, and expedite the identification and removal, of non-consensual content.

But if we really wish to reduce the incidence of non-consensual content being inappropriately uploaded onto porn sites, we can’t look to banks and prohibitionist journalists to offer solutions, when they have neither expertise nor interest in how online sex work can be conducted safely and consensually. Instead, we need to look to those on the front line; those for whom negotiating consent has become a survival skill. 

Sex workers, after all, have first-hand experience in ensuring that the content that they create is consensual, and also have an interest in ensuring that this legitimate content is not intermixed with abuse material when it is distributed online. They also have a legitimate interest in adult content not being entirely obliterated from the Internet—an interest that is being ignored by governments and corporate do-gooders who are doing the anti-porn movement’s bidding.

In 2019, sex positive communities faced similar challenges, when in quick succession, FOSTA/SESTA led to the complete elimination of a number of outlets for the publication of sexual content such as Tumblr, and for offering sexual services such as Backpage. The consequent loss of safe spaces for marginalized communities could have been avoided if more attention had been paid to voices from those communities, who had consistently been advocating for a more targeted approach—tackling sex trafficking without conflating it with consensual sex work, and removing child abuse images from Tumblr without razing every instance of a “female-presenting nipple.”

It was in response to this that Prostasia Foundation held a full-day event titled Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue on Internet Platforms, Sexual Content, & Child Protection at the headquarters of Patreon in San Francisco, to discuss how Internet platforms can protect children from abuse, while preserving space for legitimate sexual expression and discussion online, and minimizing risk. The successful event was attended by representatives from Internet platforms, the sex industry, the criminal justice sector and other stakeholder groups, and resulted in the development of a draft set of principles on sexual content moderation and child protection. Further consultation was undertaken both online and at a workshop at the Internet and human rights conference RightsCon, and the final set of principles was released at the annual meeting of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in November 2019. The principles have since informed the development of Internet platform policies and as the source for the development of a set of website certification criteria.

The time has come again to return to this approach. That’s why Prostasia Foundation and partner groups will be holding a Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue on Consent and Safety in Adult Content Distribution, that will enable sex-positive communities to mobilize to respond to the latest onslaught against online sex work, and to share their own visions of how to prevent and eliminate image-based abuse online. The anticipated outcome will be a draft set of best practices on this topic; not handed down by banks at the direction of sex work abolitionists, but developed by impacted stakeholders themselves.

We’ll be announcing the date, venue, sponsors, and partners for this event soon. There will be virtual and in-person attendance options. To pre-register, click the button below.

This month we are delighted to introduce another two new members of our team.

Our new Blog Editor Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer and editor based in Chicago. His book Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941/1948 was published by Rutgers University Press. It connects the original Wonder Woman comics to gender theory and sex positive feminism. He has also written about sex work and children’s rights.. Noah says, "I think it's important to advocate for the rights of young people, and am excited by the work Prostasia is doing. I'm looking forward to working here!"

Shaye Wentworth is our new activist intern. She is a graduate from the University of Colorado, Denver with a double major in Sociology and Psychology. She is an advocate for sex worker rights, sex positivity, intersectionality, and harm reduction. She hopes to contribute to Prostasia Foundation's work by advocating for research based, intersectional legislation that wont further marginalize the sex worker community. She also hopes to contribute with blog posts around Resotrative Justice, BSDM, and the way that changing social norms can help reduce child sexual abuse. Shaye is interested in pursuing either a Masters in Social Work or a PhD in Sociology with a minor in Sexuality

Erin Gould chats with Byrdy Lynn about her triumphant survival of early childhood trauma, including witnessing a murder, undergoing physical and psychological abuse from her father, suffering racism in high school, being sexually abused by a sibling, running away from home, and being further sexually abused by a childhood friend. In this episode Byrdy talks about body ownership, depression, friendship, and ultimately, forgiveness.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a copy of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws are Failing Us in the mail from a Prostasia supporter. Published in 2015, the book remains a timely and trenchant critique of how our society has allowed emotions to triumph over evidence and rationality in our response to child sexual abuse, resulting in laws that, as author Emily Horowitz puts it, "are not only ineffective, but promote profound and destructive fear and anxiety."

One of the most unique approaches used by Horowitz is her inclusion of narratives from real sex offenders and their families throughout the book, which vividly illustrate how Kafkaesque sex offense laws and policies operate in real life. Although some of these stories may engender sympathy—such as a 20 year old dating a 17 year old, and an adult chatroom participant catfished by police—in other cases their offending is more difficult to excuse. What's interesting is that even in these cases, she still manages to convey the humanity of the perpetrator, and the destructive effects of the laws that govern every aspect of their lives even after they have completed their sentence.

Among the restrictions that are frequently imposed on those who have offended and been released include restricting their ability to be around children (even if their original sex offense had nothing to do with children), limiting their housing and employment options, and subjecting them to humiliating one-size-fits-all treatment procedures. A particularly pitiable class of offender are juveniles themselves. As Horowitz points out, "Juvenile sex offenders are the least likely of any group to reoffend, and they have the greatest potential for rehabilitation, yet they are subject to these same highly problematic postconviction restrictions."

Horowitz also shares stories of those who were punished for offenses they were completely innocent of. Bernard Baran was an openly gay teenager falsely accused of molesting children at a daycare center where he worked. A judge in the case commented that allowing a homosexual to work in a daycare center "was the equivalent of allowing a chocoholic to work in a candy store." Baran was convicted at the age of 19 and served 21 years in prison. Although his conviction was eventually vacated, he died shortly after his release from prison due in part to the substandard medical care he received during his decades of wrongful incarceration.

Horowitz also devotes a chapter to child pornography offenders, writing "Child pornography is unique because it is the only crime in which viewing images of the crime is as bad (and often worse, in terms of sentencing) than engaging in the primary act itself, the production of these images." As other scholars such as Carissa Hessick have also pointed out, our society's undue focus on image-based offending is based on an assumption that image offenders are also likely to be undiscovered hands-on offenders, but according to researchers this generally isn't the case. As such, skewing enforcement resources towards the prosecution of image-based crimes comes at the expense of prosecuting cases of hands-on abuse. 

Horowitz's thesis is that race and poverty are often underlying factors that create the circumstances that enables sexual offending against children. She quotes social policy expert David Gil, who stated in 1979 that "If one's priority is to prevent all child abuse, one must be ready to part with its many causes, even when one is attached to some of them, such as the apparent blessings, advantages, and privileges of inequality."

For too long it has suited our society to turn its head away from these root causes, as "a combination of well-meaning efforts and subsequent hysteria created a political climate wherein legislators were willing to pass any law, no matter how ineffective, expensive, or extensive, aimed at monitoring and controlling sex offenders."

Protecting Our Kids? makes a persuasive case that America's sex offender laws, "targeting a despised population very few are willing to defend, driven by misinformation and an ongoing moral panic about sex offenders," fail to make the public safer and exact a human cost not only on those who have offended, but also on their families and very often on their victims. It's only after recognizing the failure of these popular policies that we can begin to look to experts for better solutions, including solutions that can prevent offending from taking place to begin with.

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