Chapter 1

Victimization

Women, men, and children who believe they have been harmed

by pornography described adverse physical and psychological effects in their public testimony before the Commission and other bodies and in accounts given in writing or in interviews by Commission staff. The Commission heard testimony from thirty witnesses who reported that they or others with whom they had special relationships had been harmed in some manner by or as a result of pornography. More than one hundred persons were interviewed by Commission staff investigators, who were law enforcement personnel with considerable experience in dealing with trauma victims. Although in many instances, facts related by the person interviewed could be verified by reference to treatment records, court records, or law enforcement files, in other instances no independent verification was possible. In addition to the foregoing, a number of other statements were received in letters from persons who reported pornography-related victimization and in exhibits filed by witnesses from hearings before other fact finders, including city councils, courts of record, and the United States Senate. Some of these individuals reported an extensive series of traumatic events in their lives, making it difficult to assess the relationship, if any, between pornography and their suffering.

Witnesses attributed to pornography their having been

coerced into pornographic performances, bound and beaten in direct imitation of pornography, and forcibly imprisoned for the purpose of manufacturing pornography. Although this Commission can neither conclusively determine that pornography caused these physical harms nor conclusively determine that it did not, it was the opinion of the witnesses that pornography played a central role in the pattern of abuse within which they were harmed. Witnesses attributed many different kinds of damage to psychological functioning and sense of self to their having been used in the production of pornographic materials, exposed to pornographic materials, or sexually assaulted by offenders who used pornography as part of the abuse.

Many of these

psychological injuries correspond to the signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.762

Witnesses also attributed to

pornography financial losses due to hospitalization and therapy, damage to family relationships and status in the community caused by defamatory representations in pornography, associations between prostitution and pornography, and sexual harassment

through pornography.

Many of the women, men, and children who

762

"The essential feature is the development of characteristic symptoms following a psychologically traumatic event that is generally outside the range of human experience. The characteristic symptoms involve reexperiencing the traumatic event; numbing of responsiveness to, or deduced involvement with, the external world; and a variety of autonomic, dysphoric, or cognitive symptoms." American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 236 (3d ed. 1980).

testified reported each of these types of consequences, and some individuals are quoted repeatedly in various sections of this

chapter.

Although we have tried in this chapter to allow victims to speak in their own words, without interpretation or commentary, we have in several instances quoted the words of victims' mothers, friends, or therapists. We have done so only because there are instances in which the victims themselves were

unavailable for testimony.

In the same vein, we quote here

pertinent excerpts from the eloquent testimony of Andrea Dworkin on behalf of many other victims whose voices were not heard: My name is Andrea Dworkin. I am a citizen of the United States, and in this country where I live, every year millions of pictures are being made of women with our legs spread. We are called beaver, we are called pussy, our genitals are tied up, they are pasted, makeup is put on them to make them pop out of a page at a male viewer. Millions and millions of pictures are made of us in postures of submission and sexual access so that our vaginas are exposed for penetration, our anuses are exposed for penetration, our throats are used as if they are genitals for penetration. In this country where I live as a citizen real rapes are on film and are being sold in the marketplace. And the major motif of pornography as a form of entertainment is that women are raped and violated and humiliated until we discover that we like it and at that point we ask for more.

In this country where I live as a citizen, women are
penetrated by animals and objects for public
entertainment, women are urinated on and defecated on,
women and girls are used interchangeably so that grown
women are made up to look like five- or six-year-old
children surrounded by toys, presented in mainstream
pornographic publications for anal penetration. There
are magazines in which adult women are presented with
their pubic areas shaved SO that they resemble

children.

In this country where I live, there is a trafficking in

pornography that exploits mentally and physically disabled women, women who are maimed; there is amputee pornography, a trade in women who have been maimed in that way, as if that is a sexual fetish for men. In this country where I live, there is a trade in racism as a form of sexual pleasure, so that the plantation is presented as a form of sexual gratification for the black woman slave who asks please to be abused, please to be raped, please to be hurt. Black skin is presented as if it is a female genital, and all the violence and the abuse and the humiliation that is in general directed against female genitals is directed against the black skin of women in pornography.

Asian women in this country where I live are tied from trees and hung from ceilings and hung from doorways as a form of public entertainment. There is a

concentration camp pornography in this country where I live, where the concentration camp and the atrocities that occurred there are presented as existing for the sexual pleasure of the victim, of the woman, who orgasms to the real abuses that occurred, not very long ago in history.

In the country where I live as a citizen, there is a pornography of the humiliation of women where every single way of humiliating a human being is taken to be a form of sexual pleasure for the viewer and for the victim; where women are covered in filth, including feces, including mud, including paint, including blood, including semen; where women are tortured for the sexual pleasure of those who watch and those who do the torture, where women are murdered for the sexual pleasure of murdering women, and this material exists because it is fun, because it is entertainment, because it is a form of pleasure, and there are those who say it is a form of freedom.

Certainly it is freedom for those who do it. Certainly it is freedom for those who use it as entertainment, but we are also asked to believe that it is freedom for those to whom it is done.

Then this entertainment is taken, and it is used on other women, women who aren't in the pornography, to force those women into prostitution, to make them imitate the acts in the pornography. The women in the pornography, sixty-five to seventy percent of them we believe are victims of incest or child sexual abuse. They are poor women; they are not women who have opportunities in this society. The are frequently runaways who are picked up by pimps and exploited.

They are frequently raped, the rapes are filmed, they are kept in prostitution by blackmail. The pornography is used on prostitutes by johns who are expected to replicate the sexual acts in the pornography, no matter how damaging it is.

Pornography is used in rape--to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act. Pornography is used in gang rape against women. We see an increase since the release of "Deep Throat" in throat rape--where women show up in emergency rooms because men believe they can penetrate, deep-thrust, to the bottom of a woman's throat. We see increasing use of all elements of pornography in battery, which is the most commonly committed violent crime in this country, including the rape of women by animals, including maiming, including heavy bondage, including outright torture.

We have seen in the last eight years, an increase in the use of cameras in rapes. And those rapes are filmed and then they are put on the marketplace and they are protected speech--they are real rapes. We see pornography in the harassment of women on jobs, especially in nontraditional jobs, in the harassment of women in education, to create terror and compliance in the home, which as you know is the most dangerous place for women in this society, where more violence is committed against women than anywhere else. We see pornography used to create harassment of women and children in neighborhoods that are saturated with pornography, where people come from other parts of the city and then prey on the populations of people who live in those neighborhoods, and that increases physical attack and verbal assault.

We see pornography having introduced a profit motive into rape. We see that filmed rapes are protected speech. We see the centrality of pornography in serial murders. There are snuff films. We see boys imitating pornography.

We see the average age of rapists going down. We are beginning to see gang rapes in elementary schools committed by elementary school age boys imitating pornography. We see sexual assault after death where frequently the pornography is the motive for the murder because the man believes that he will get a particular kind of sexual pleasure having sex with a woman after she is dead.

We see a major trade in women, we

see the torture of