A story that was painful to write, but far, far more painful to live.
Yesterday “The Daily,” a New York Times podcast, released an episode on sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts called ‘Something Terrible Has Happened.’ Dave Henson, who’s 40 now, described being raped for the first time when he was 11, in a tent by a scout leader. “All I really remember was the pain, and the darkness, and the weight,” he said. He said he doesn’t remember a lot about his childhood after that night. Just “feeling alone a lot, feeling different from everyone else.” |
One reason abused children don’t tell is because of that feeling. You were a child like other children, but now you’re something else. Maybe the more upsetting fact is that those children are not alone — that what happened to them has happened to more people than we ever want to admit. |
I listened to that episode while we were finishing Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday Review cover story on the website Pornhub. He describes a company that profits off the exploitation of children. It has taken some minimal steps to crack down on abusive content, but it has still hosted spycam footage and revenge porn and videos of women and girls being assaulted, in which rapists touch the victims’ eyeballs to show that they’re unconscious. |
Nick isn’t deluded about the scale of this problem, but he has some prescriptions that one prominent porn actress calls “insanely reasonable.” For instance: Don’t allow users to download videos. This would mean that, when a woman alerted the site that it was sharing a video of her being sex-trafficked as a child, the video could be deleted before it was downloaded onto the computers of perhaps thousands of men. |
One issue we discussed a lot during the editing process was how direct to be about search terms that allow users to get around the site’s limited controls. We certainly didn’t want to make it easier for people to find this content. But it’s already easy — that’s Nick’s point. He also said that Pornhub tends to act quickly when loopholes become public, and would probably block any search terms he mentioned. “While I understand the concern,” he told me, “I think it’s the only way to get Pornhub to address the problem.” |
It’s painful to read this story; it must have been painful to write it, and far, far more painful to live it. “I’ve often thought that we humans are worst at developing policy toward problems that are hard to talk about,” Nick told me. “Mental health. Domestic violence. Anything to do with sex. And I’m hoping that the reaction to this piece doesn’t get bogged down in a debate about porn; whatever we think of porn, we should be able to agree that 14-year-old girls shouldn’t have their lives upended when they foolishly send a crush a naked video.” |
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