September 1, 2016
National Catholic Register: The Politics of Pornography
Elizabeth Smart has become a public face for a new strategy to frame hard-core porn as a public-health issue, and it has also become a topic of discussion in the presidential election campaign.
Pornography may have crossed over into mainstream pop culture more than a generation ago and is considered by many today to be a harmless indulgence, but activists are hopeful that a new strategy to frame hard-core porn as a public health issue will start to change how people think about it.
Elizabeth Smart, who in 2002 was kidnapped at the age of 14 in Utah and raped daily during her ensuing nine months of captivity by her captor, became a prominent face for this anti-pornography campaign in late August: In a new video in which she discusses her sexual abuse, Smart recounts that her kidnapper was fixated on explicitly sexual media and would violate her even more frequently after viewing it...