If a man exposed himself to children on a street corner, he would be arrested and charged with assault. However, when essentially the same thing happens online, there are no consequences. Instead, lawmakers and police assume that if children come across predatory pornography or strangers attempting to recruit them into porn, it’s a problem of parental supervision.

It’s well past time to stop treating the internet as a space where the rules don’t apply and to take seriously the sexual exploitation of minors that occurs online.

In fact, it’s even more urgent in light of the recent revelations about the world’s largest pornography website. Last month, Nicholas Kristof described in The New York Times internal memos from Pornhub. These memos were supposed to remain sealed but were released due to a filing error in an Alabama Federal District Court. In these memos, Pornhub employees admitted to knowing of and even joking about child sexual abuse on their website.

In one message from May of 2020, employees at Pornhub were aware of over 700,000 videos on their site that users had flagged for “depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems.” One employee wrote: “I hope I never get in trouble for having those vids on my computer [laugh out loud].” Another argued against banning a user who posted an underage video because “the user made money.” Yet another memo noted that videos apparently showing child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times. (The population of the United States, for reference, is 340 million.) These revelations shed more light on the website’s practices and how aware they were of the problem leading up to Kristof’s 2020 expose titled, “The Children of Pornhub.” That article documented the cesspool of child abuse and non-consensual material on so-called “adult” websites and how these companies remorselessly profited from it.

Within days of the article, Pornhub removed 10 million videos—nearly 75% of its content—because it could not verify that these videos showed consenting adults. But this is far from a solution. Kristof pointed to these recently leaked memos as proof that “we should never trust tech companies to police themselves.” On the contrary, their past behavior and ongoing acceptance of abuse and child porn-related search terms, and the fact that many of the same people still work there, show that only legal and economic consequences will curb their exploitation.

This is an ongoing and worsening problem. A recent study found that one in eight of the video titles on the largest pornography sites in the U.K. “described activities that constitute sexual violence.” Even when no laws are being broken, children are still being directly harmed. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation argues that porn normalizes sexual violence and abuse for young users by design.

All this is why it’s time to treat online exploitation exactly as we would treat it in the “real world.” Both Kristof and the NCSE offer the following recommendations. The full weight of civil and criminal penalties should be leveled against pornography websites. States should pass and implement age-verification laws, and wherever politically feasible, full bans on porn. We should support legal action being brought against the giants of the industry for past and ongoing abuses; for instance, supporting the NCSE’s lawsuit against Pornhub, and demanding the Department of Justice investigate the website OnlyFans for sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material. A good first step is the bipartisan Take it Down Act that President Trump recently signed into law aimed to help victims of digital exploitation.

We should also attack the porn industry’s bottom line. Kristof highlights the company Prune, which “pressures web hosts, payment systems, ad networks and domain registrars” to cut ties with offending websites. We can demand that credit card companies stop facilitating payments to OnlyFans and other sites, and put pressure on mainstream advertisers, which account for around half of profits for porn sites.

Finally, Christians must recognize and make the case that the problem isn’t merely abusive or nonconsensual porn. It’s porn. Only a cultural transformation that goes deeper than mere consent—that offers a positive, God-honoring vision for sexuality and family—will be able to uproot this evil.

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