Laila Mickelwait, CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, has two over-arching questions about Big Porn.
First, is it causing harm?
Second, if it is really causing harm, what can be done about it?

* Children in foster care are at increased risk for trafficking.
* Removing a child from his or her parents can be a balancing act between dangers at home and possible danger of trafficking.
* In some cases, the trauma of removal can be as devastating as the crisis that led to the removal.

Here are some of the COVID-19-caused vulnerabilities
1. Lockdown-caused Vulnerability
2. Decreased Governmental Resources for Combatting Human Trafficking
3. Impact on Charitable Giving

Patti Hathaway has an interesting way of looking at life’s problems. She asks, “Are you a thermostat or a thermometer?”

* Pornography is the world’s de facto system for sex education
* Porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.
* Children are learning that sex means violence, degradation, and humiliation.

* There’s a tight connection between prostitution and criminality.
* Traffickers are often motivated to encourage pornography.
* Trafficking doesn’t exist in isolation; it is part of a whole ecosystem of criminality.

* Trafficking is a $150-billion-a-year global mega-business.
* Trafficking flourishes because it’s extremely profitable and there’s rarely any penalty for this crime.
* The anti-trafficking organization Polaris is taking a new approach to preventing trafficking: making jail time more likely by using the traffickers’ financial records.

Unpacking a possible link between the Atlanta murders and sex trafficking.

* Human traffickers prey on both adults and children alike, generating $150 billion a year.
* Traffickers use violence to terrorize victims into silence, making the chances of a trafficker doing jail time less than 1 in 100.
* Anti-money laundering organizations have begun to find and seize traffickers’ illegal profits, but their efforts are under-funded.

The speaker, Duncan Jepson, is the founder of Liberty Shared, an anti-trafficking organization. He and his colleagues are attacking the Achilles’ heel of trafficking, and that is, the obscene profitability that results when labor costs are close to free.