Testimony in Minneapolis: Exposed to Porn as a Child, Woman Behaves Like a Victim of Incest

Minneapolis city officials received testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn, those
who consume porn and those who produce it at a hearing of the
Minneapolis Government Operations Committee in December 1983. This
letter is published in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.236-237).

Letter of Marcia Kading, Special Project Coordinator, Family Nurturing Center, December 8, 1983

I have been at Southside [Family Nurturing Center] for seven years…

We do not customarily ask about pornography on our intakes. As I became more involved with one of my clients, she began to tell me about what happened to her in her household. Her father had consistently showed her pictures of nude women, saying how he was attracted to them, using explicit language. He very often went to bars and picked up women and came back and told her all about his experiences. He also kept an arsenal of guns in his house.

This woman was very confused about why her behavior was so much like a victim of incest. She had three children with three different fathers, she got involved with abusive men who used her sexually. After talking about her background with myself and an incest therapist, she came to realize that what she was experiencing was common to victims of incest. This had happened even though her father had never touched her.

In talking to the staff, we came up with several other families in which pornography went hand in hand with abusive behavior. There is definitely a link between the two, they are both harmful and destructive.

See also:

Porn’s “Verbatim” Accounts of the Pleasures of Child Sexual Abuse Don’t Square with Reality

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