Exploitation

Donna M. Hughes, “The Internet and the Global Prostitution Industry,” discusses how the internet is enabling sexual exploitation of women and children through pornography, bride trafficking, prostitution tours, and lack of regulations for the internet. The internet makes it easy to do things anonymously and therefore stay almost above the law, both for consumers and sellers. Some magazines have actually praised some of these web pornographers for their business techniques. For example PC Computing Esays about pornography websites, “It will show you the future of the on-line commerce. Web pornographers are the most innovative entrepreneurs in the Internet.” (246) It is true though, web pornographers are often the leaders in creating new secure ways to pay, better privacy settings, and more security; these are things that almost every company on the internet needs. I agree with Hughes in that something needs to be done about this problem. There needs to be some sort of regulations. Every time a law is passed people claim that it is censorship and against the freedom of speech. For example, “The December 1996 issue of Wired, the leading professional publication on the Internet, stated that a new law in the United States, which made it illegal to transmit indecent materials to minors, was censorship.” This to me is just asinine. I agree with free speech and am not for censorship, but this law was to protect children from harm. I feel that if some of these people believe that transmitting sexually explicit material to children is their right, then it is in the best interest of everyone that that person is censored and stopped. At what point do the people who are screaming that these regulations would be violating their rights realize that no one should have the right to harm anyone else? The solutions that are being promoted only serve to screen out sexually explicit material to protect children from being exposed to it. It is good to want to protect our children from seeing these things, but we must also concern ourselves with the people who are being exploited in the first place. Values and morals are often lost on the internet. Things that are normally considered as criminal and wrong happen on a normal basis, things that people would normally not say or do, become easy because of the anonymity of the internet. Hughes argues that, “The European Union defines trafficking as a form of organized crime. It should be treated the same way on the internet. All forms of sexual exploitation should be recognized as forms of violence against women and human rights violations, and governments should act accordingly.”(459) I believe that is very true. The exploitation and objectification of these women and children is, I believe, wrong and violates their rights as humans. There is real harm being done to real people, something needs to be done to intervene. I know that it would be very difficult to regulate the material and probably impossible to eliminate these sites that exploit women and children, but I do believe that if it is kept up, we can at least “make a dent” in it. As for those who believe that any sort of regulation would be censorship and a violation of their rights I ask this question and urge them to think critically: Why does the right to exploit women and children win out to the basic human right not to be exploited?