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Make sure you add what is necessary for us to understand your topic well enough.

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A new documentary investigates our society’s self-image crisis

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There aren’t many people who exude as much confidence as Alison Lapper. Watching the artist pose for the photographer Rankin […]

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*Unattainable
*Influencers
*1%
*"Role Models"
*etc.
*set the standard

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The Kardashian-Jenners are known for their tiny waists, curvaceous bodies, perfectly poreless skin and plump lips. A quick look at any of their Instagram accounts is evidence of that. But, it's long been a topic of debate about whether the family (who are known to have undergone plastic surgery and enhancements, as well as edit their photos), are promoting unattainable beauty standards.

But now, Kim Kardashian has weighed in on the argument. After being asked during the Keeping Up With The Kardashians reunion special if the family thought they'd created an unattainable standard of beauty, Kim said: "No, I don't. Because I think we get up, we do the work. We work out."

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Kendall Jenner also gave her thoughts on the topic, telling viewers "we all really enjoy taking care of ourselves and being healthy, so I think if anything, the only thing we're really trying to represent is just being the most healthy version of yourself."

While the family certainly do post workout clips and gym selfies on socials, critics still argue that they haven't achieved their looks though exercise alone. Body positivity activist Jameela Jamil has frequently spoken out against the beauty standards that the Kar-Jenners perpetuate.

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In an Instagram post, Jameela said: "Let's be real. Their surgeons reshaped the beauty industry. People buy make up to try to look like people who were carved and injected to look like that. Which is fine. But it would be helpful for that transparency to be more accounted for to avoid disappointment."

She continued, "I'm not anti surgery. I am pro transparency."
SIGN UP TO HAYU! Watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians Reunion Special now.

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Kim reacts to claims her family promote unattainable beauty standards

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The Kardashian-Jenners are known for their tiny waists, curvaceous bodies, perfectly poreless skin and plump lips. A quick look at any of their Instagram accounts is evidence of that. But, it's long been a topic of debate about whether the family (who are known to have undergone plastic surgery and enhancements, as well as edit their photos), are promoting unattainable beauty standards.

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By: Sydney Burns | Writer & Emma Earlywine | Writer

September 27, 2017

This past Sunday, September 24, 2017, marks the 10 year anniversary of the hit reality TV show, "Keeping up with the Kardashians."

Throughout the past decade, the Kardashians have taken the world by storm. The Kardashians first started out as a source for comedy relief, then they quickly escalated to one of the most iconic families of the industry. With the influence of the Kardashians on lives today, most teens expect the "body goals," lavish lifestyles, and the ageless faces, shown by the Kardashian clan.

Throughout the years of television and social media, the "perfect" body images have been flashed in the faces of millions of teens worldwide. With these images and videos scattered over all social media platforms, many teens have begun to feel fat or not beautiful because of the photos shown of celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner. For example, in March 2016, Kim Kardashian posted a nude mirror selfie on Instagram. This post was littered with comments from teen girls saying things like, "Why can't I look like that?" and "Wow I am fat."

When asking students from SCHS about how they feel about the Kardashians and the message they send, we received answers like this, "The Kardashians set a certain body type and beauty, that many teens feel they need to be like" said senior Steven Ross. "They set an unrealistic body goal for normal people, because they have the help of plastic surgery and expensive products."

Nowadays, with the technology and social media platforms available to us, teens need to remember that how you act and treat people is more important than the outside image of who you are.

With the past decade of having the social media platforms and the influence of the Kardashians, almost all the teens today do not remember a time without Iphones, or a time without the Kardashians. With the fashion and beauty icons being constantly flashed in our faces through social media platforms like Instagram, SnapChat, and Twitter, it feels like the Kardashians grip on the world today is only getting tighter. In the past decade we have seen a significant change in the appearances of the family, highlighting the sisters, Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner.

Recently Khloe replied to an interview with Life&Style magazine, "I definitely am a fan of plastic surgery. We're all putting on a mask basically every day anyway...you're changing who you are, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that." Khloe supports the idea of changing the outside appearance of people with the use of plastic surgery. This opinion provided by an iconic figure, has the potential to eschew the views of teens today.

Senior Sierra Moore, commented, "With all the plastic surgery and the alterations of people's faces, it feels like there is so much pressure to be perfect today." This is a sad thought to think that many teens today suffer from the insecurities of not being "beautiful enough" for the world today. In 2016 it has been reported that over 64,000 teens get plastic surgery each year. This is an outrageous amount of teens that pay a significant amount of money to alter their physical appearances, to impress others and themselves. With the past 10 years of the Kardashians sparking an increase in self insecurity and plastic surgery in teens, who knows what the next decade will bring.

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A Decade of the Kardashian's Influence on Teens Today

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By: Sydney Burns | Writer & Emma Earlywine | Writer September 27, 2017 This past Sunday, September 24, 2017, marks the 10 year anniversary of the hit reality TV show, "Keeping up with the Kardashians." Throughout the past decade, the Kardashians have taken the world by storm.

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Fashion Trends Started By The Kardashians - The List

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Like it or not, the Kardashians are a modern day fashion dynasty.

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Abstract

The aim of this study was to understand the social identity levels of adolescents and to analyze the negative effects of social media on their social identity from the perspective of social work. The researcher used a descriptive-analytical technique in this study. The study's sample consisted of 200 adolescents (male and female) in the secondary stage at age group (15-18 years). The researcher designed a questionnaire based on the four main levels of James Marcia's theory of social identity. The results showed a variety of negative effects of social media on the social identity of adolescents in terms of "achievement - postponement - closure - dispersion", this requires taking serious measures from the family, the school, and other institutions to care for the family and the child to strengthen how to face these risks to protect the identity of adolescents from violating their privacy and negatively affecting their intellectual principles.

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The negative effects of social media on the social identity of adolescents from the perspective of social work

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The aim of this study was to understand the social identity levels of adolescents and to analyze the negative effects of social media on their social identity from the perspective of social work. The researcher used a descriptive-analytical technique in this study.

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The dangers of what's in America's packaged food: Sienna Madrigal

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The dangers of what's in America's packaged food: Sienna Madrigal

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America's packaged food contains toxic chemicals and additives that cause cancer, higher obesity rates, disease, and other problems. In America, some foods contain additives that are banned in other countries and even contain warning labels about it causing or increasing the risk of cancer.

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Does the state of Texas need stricter gun laws?

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Another mass shooting. This time at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. It was predictable and perhaps even preventable.

Texans want safe schools and reasonable improvements to gun control and mental health policies, but state policymakers have failed to enact common-sense policies that would save lives.

The trauma endured in the Uvalde community was predictable because Texas has already witnessed too many mass shootings in schools, churches and retail stores without any meaningful policy changes to date. The Uvalde school shooting was also the 27th school shooting this year.

Four other mass shootings stand out and should have brought about significant policy changes. In 2019, a 21-year-old racist from the Dallas area drove to El Paso and killed 23 people. A few weeks later, another mass shooting killed 8 people in Midland-Odessa. In 2018, 10 adults and students were killed and 13 were injured by a 17-year-old student at Santa Fe High School in the Houston area. In 2017, 26 people were killed at a Sutherland Springs church - the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history.

In the wake of the El Paso shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott said, "Our goal is to make sure we do everything we can to make sure a crime like this doesn't happen again." Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said on Fox News he was "willing to take an arrow" from the National Rifle Association for strengthening background checks. Unfortunately, the Texas Legislature went in the opposite direction and made it legal for individuals to carry handguns without a license or training in 2021.

Days after the Santa Fe shooting, Abbott presented a 40-page list of recommendations to improve school safety, including providing mental health evaluations that identify students at risk of harming others. Yet, many of these recommendations were never implemented, and the events in Uvalde suggest that many schools are not safer.

Mass shootings keep happening amid broken political promises. And most Texans report a desire for reform. Overall, almost 60% of Texans oppose unlicensed carry, and almost half of Texas voters would make gun laws stricter if they could. Only 18% of Texans oppose criminal and mental health background checks.

The failure to listen to the public consensus on gun control is also made worse by a broken school finance system. A recent analysis revealed that Texas was among the bottom three states nationally (with Alabama and Mississippi) for funding adequacy at the district level. Consequently, many Texas schools lack a full-time school counselor who can conduct mental health assessments, work with teachers to implement a mental health program for the school, and provide counseling to students and families in need.

These policy failures are unacceptable. As education researchers, we have been in hundreds of schools across the state and interviewed and worked with teachers, principals, superintendents and school counselors. They care deeply about their students, and they need help.

We hope the horrific events at Robb Elementary School compel state policymakers to enact common-sense reforms. They can start by reviewing state policies that allow teenagers to access weapons.

Policymakers should also address the lack of mental health support within schools. In many rural contexts like Uvalde, schools can be an important community hub for health care and mental health support. Additional investments can be made to ensure every school has a school counselor and student caseloads do not exceed 250 students.

In addition, the state can provide additional funding for training school counselors, providing additional professional development for all school personnel on mental health, and assisting schools and community organizations in implementing research-informed community and school violence prevention programs.

We all want a safer Texas where children and adults do not need to live in fear of the next mass shooting. Gun violence is complicated and each case is unique, but we need state policymakers to support our schools and enact common-sense gun control policies to prevent the next mass shooting.
David DeMatthews is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin.
Carleton Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Services at The University of Texas at El Paso.

A version of this op-ed appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Waco Tribune Herald, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, and San Antonio Express News.

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Better Mental Health Care, Commonsense Gun Control Are the Ways to Make Texas Safer - UT News

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Another mass shooting. This time at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. It was predictable and perhaps even preventable. Texans want safe schools and reasonable improvements to gun control and mental health policies, but state policymakers have failed to enact common-sense policies that would save lives.

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an article on the justification of the death penalty when the crime fits. in this case, being an aunt and uncle abusing and ultimately murdering their four-year-old niece.

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Genny Rojas was four years old when her aunt and uncle, Veronica and Ivan Gonzales, tortured and murdered her. They suspended her alive by a hook on the closet wall in their apartment. They shook her violently, strangled her, beat her with a hairbrush, and handcuffed her for days. She died after she was forced into a scalding bath tub for three minutes. A California jury sentenced Veronica and Ivan to death, and the California Supreme Court upheld their convictions. If anyone deserved the ultimate punishment, they did.

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How did education change after COVID-19?
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/01/texas-schools-coronavirus-learning-loss/

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The pandemic has undone years of educational gains in Texas schools. Here’s what the road to recovery looks like.

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Gaps in student learning because of pandemic disruptions could impact students in the long term.

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The warning label urges people to be cautious of the fact that this food will expose you to lead and increases the risk of cancer.

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The dangers of what's in America's packaged food: Sienna Madrigal

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The dangers of what's in America's packaged food: Sienna Madrigal

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Affordable Housing crisis in the U.S. : Kendall Warwas

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Affordable Housing crisis in the U.S. : Kendall Warwas

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Nationally, there is a shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes for our nation's 10.8 million plus extremely low-income families.

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-Victims / Families of victims
-Law makers/ Legislation
-citizens of Texas

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Record-breaking numbers of families cannot afford a decent place to call home:

Nationally, there is a shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes for our nation's 10.8 million plus extremely low-income families. View The Gap

There is no state or county where a renter working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. View the Out of Reach Map

Seventy percent of all extremely low-income families are severely cost-burdened, paying more than half their income on rent.

This is a problem! Every state and every community is impacted. Families have few options. Each year the shortage gets worse; and that's why people are homeless in our country and why families struggle to pay for groceries and visits to their doctor.

Why it Matters:

Housing is the key to reducing intergenerational poverty and increasing economic mobility. Research shows that increasing access to affordable housing is the most cost-effective strategy for reducing childhood poverty and increasing economic mobility in the United States. Stanford economist Raj Chetty found that children who moved to lower poverty neighborhoods saw their earnings as adults increase by approximately 31%, an increased likelihood of living in better neighborhoods as adults, and a lowered likelihood of becoming a single parent. Moreover, children living in stable, affordable homes are more likely to thrive in school and have greater opportunities to learn inside and outside the classroom.

Increasing access to affordable housing bolsters economic growth. Research shows that the shortage of affordable housing costs the American economy about $2 trillion a year in lower wages and productivity. Without affordable housing, families have constrained opportunities to increase earnings, causing slower GDP growth. In fact, researchers estimate that the growth in GDP between 1964 and 2009 would have been 13.5% higher if families had better access to affordable housing. This would have led to a $1.7 trillion increase in income, or $8,775 in additional wages per worker. Moreover, each dollar invested in affordable housing boosts local economies by leveraging public and private resources to generate income-including resident earnings and additional local tax revenue-and supports job creation and retention.

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Research shows that increasing access to affordable housing is the most cost-effective strategy for reducing childhood poverty and increasing economic mobility in the United States. Learn more here.

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nytimes.com-Why the Road Is Getting Even Rockier for First-Time Home Buyers

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Should firearms be reduced and limited or should firearm access be encouraged?

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Law enforcement
Defendents
Victims
🤬 viewers

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Opioids are a class of drugs naturally found in the opium poppy plant and that work in the brain to produce a variety of effects, including the relief of pain with many of these drugs.

Opioids can be prescription medications often referred to as painkillers, or they can be so-called street drugs, such as heroin.

Many prescription opioids are used to block pain signals between the brain and the body and are typically prescribed to treat moderate to severe pain. In addition to controlling pain, opioids can make some people feel relaxed, happy or "high," and can be addictive. Additional side effects can include slowed breathing, constipation, nausea, confusion and drowsiness.

Opioids by Name

Opioids are sometimes referred to as narcotics and although they do relieve pain, they do not fall into the same category as over-the-counter painkillers such as aspirin and Tylenol.

The most commonly used opioids are:

prescription opioids, such as OxyContin and Vicodin

fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50-100 times more potent than morphine

heroin, an illegal drug

Using Opioids

Opioid use does not come without risks. Regular use of these prescribed medications can increase your tolerance and dependence, requiring higher and more frequent doses. In some cases longer term use can lead to addiction (or what doctors will call "opioid use disorder"). In addition, opioids can restrict your ability to breathe when taken at a higher dose, and when misused, can lead to a fatal overdose. The risk of respiratory depression (slowing or even stopping your breathing), increases if you have never taken an opioid before or if you are taking other medications/drugs that interact with the opioid. Opioids, which can interact with diseases, too, should only be used if needed for pain, including if alternatives for pain control are not effective.

Be sure to review your current medications and disclose any past or present drug use with your doctor when discussing whether an opioid prescription is right for you. If you have a personal or family history of substance abuse, you may be at increased risk of becoming more easily dependent on opioids, and you should tell your health care provider about this. Also be sure to ask about alternative treatments. If you and your health care provider agree that an opioid prescription is the best option for managing your pain, follow all treatment instructions and "mind your meds" to keep yourself and your community safe.

Common Drug Names and Brand Names of Opioids

When any of these drugs are prescribed to you or a family member for any reason, be aware that they are opioids and should be taken as directed and only when needed.

Prescription Opioids

Hydrocodone-Acetaminophen

Pseudoephedrine-Hydrocodone

Hydrocodone-Clorpheniramine

Hydrocodone-Cpm-Pseudoephed

Codeine Poli-Chlorphenir Poli

Oxymorphone Hydrochloride

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Opioids are a class of drugs naturally found in the opium poppy plant and that work in the brain to produce a variety of effects, including the relief of pain with many of these drugs. Opioids can be prescription medications often referred to as painkillers, or they can be so-called street drugs, such as heroin.

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https://www.edutopia.org/article/covid-19s-impact-students-academic-and-mental-well-being

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The pandemic has shone a spotlight on inequality in America: School closures and social isolation have affected all students, but particularly those living in poverty. Adding to the damage to their learning, a mental health crisis is emerging as many students have lost access to services that were offered by schools.

No matter what form school takes when the new year begins-whether students and teachers are back in the school building together or still at home-teachers will face a pressing issue: How can they help students recover and stay on track throughout the year even as their lives are likely to continue to be disrupted by the pandemic?

New research provides insights about the scope of the problem-as well as potential solutions.

The Achievement Gap Is Likely to Widen

A new study suggests that the coronavirus will undo months of academic gains, leaving many students behind. The study authors project that students will start the new school year with an average of 66 percent of the learning gains in reading and 44 percent of the learning gains in math, relative to the gains for a typical school year. But the situation is worse on the reading front, as the researchers also predict that the top third of students will make gains, possibly because they're likely to continue reading with their families while schools are closed, thus widening the achievement gap.

To make matters worse, "few school systems provide plans to support students who need accommodations or other special populations," the researchers point out in the study, potentially impacting students with special needs and English language learners.

Of course, the idea that over the summer students forget some of what they learned in school isn't new. But there's a big difference between summer learning loss and pandemic-related learning loss: During the summer, formal schooling stops, and learning loss happens at roughly the same rate for all students, the researchers point out. But instruction has been uneven during the pandemic, as some students have been able to participate fully in online learning while others have faced obstacles-such as lack of internet access-that have hindered their progress.

In the study, researchers analyzed a national sample of 5 million students in grades 3-8 who took the MAP Growth test, a tool schools use to assess students' reading and math growth throughout the school year. The researchers compared typical growth in a standard-length school year to projections based on students being out of school from mid-March on. To make those projections, they looked at research on the summer slide, weather- and disaster-related closures (such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), and absenteeism.

The researchers predict that, on average, students will experience substantial drops in reading and math, losing roughly three months' worth of gains in reading and five months' worth of gains in math. For Megan Kuhfeld, the lead author of the study, the biggest takeaway isn't that learning loss will happen-that's a given by this point-but that students will come back to school having declined at vastly different rates.

"We might be facing unprecedented levels of variability come fall," Kuhfeld told me. "Especially in school districts that serve families with lots of different needs and resources. Instead of having students reading at a grade level above or below in their classroom, teachers might have kids who slipped back a lot versus kids who have moved forward."

Disproportionate Impact on Students Living in Poverty and Students of Color

Horace Mann once referred to schools as the "great equalizers," yet the pandemic threatens to expose the underlying inequities of remote learning. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center analysis, 17 percent of teenagers have difficulty completing homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection. For Black students, the number spikes to 25 percent.

"There are many reasons to believe the Covid-19 impacts might be larger for children in poverty and children of color," Kuhfeld wrote in the study. Their families suffer higher rates of infection, and the economic burden disproportionately falls on Black and Hispanic parents, who are less likely to be able to work from home during the pandemic.

Although children are less likely to become infected with Covid-19, the adult mortality rates, coupled with the devastating economic consequences of the pandemic, will likely have an indelible impact on their well-being.

Impacts on Students' Mental Health

That impact on well-being may be magnified by another effect of school closures: Schools are "the de facto mental health system for many children and adolescents," providing mental health services to 57 percent of adolescents who need care, according to the authors of a recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics. School closures may be especially disruptive for children from lower-income families, who are disproportionately likely to receive mental health services exclusively from schools.

"The Covid-19 pandemic may worsen existing mental health problems and lead to more cases among children and adolescents because of the unique combination of the public health crisis, social isolation, and economic recession," write the authors of that study.

A major concern the researchers point to: Since most mental health disorders begin in childhood, it is essential that any mental health issues be identified early and treated. Left untreated, they can lead to serious health and emotional problems. In the short term, video conferencing may be an effective way to deliver mental health services to children.

Mental health and academic achievement are linked, research shows. Chronic stress changes the chemical and physical structure of the brain, impairing cognitive skills like attention, concentration, memory, and creativity. "You see deficits in your ability to regulate emotions in adaptive ways as a result of stress," said Cara Wellman, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Indiana University in a 2014 interview. In her research, Wellman discovered that chronic stress causes the connections between brain cells to shrink in mice, leading to cognitive deficiencies in the prefrontal cortex.

While trauma-informed practices were widely used before the pandemic, they're likely to be even more integral as students experience economic hardships and grieve the loss of family and friends. Teachers can look to schools like Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville, Tennessee, as a model for trauma-informed practices.

3 Ways Teachers Can Prepare

When schools reopen, many students may be behind, compared to a typical school year, so teachers will need to be very methodical about checking in on their students-not just academically but also emotionally. Some may feel prepared to tackle the new school year head-on, but others will still be recovering from the pandemic and may still be reeling from trauma, grief, and anxiety.

Here are a few strategies teachers can prioritize when the new school year begins:

Focus on relationships first. Fear and anxiety about the pandemic-coupled with uncertainty about the future-can be disruptive to a student's ability to come to school ready to learn. Teachers can act as a powerful buffer against the adverse effects of trauma by helping to establish a safe and supportive environment for learning. From morning meetings to regular check-ins with students, strategies that center around relationship-building will be needed in the fall.

Strengthen diagnostic testing. Educators should prepare for a greater range of variability in student learning than they would expect in a typical school year. Low-stakes assessments such as exit tickets and quizzes can help teachers gauge how much extra support students will need, how much time should be spent reviewing last year's material, and what new topics can be covered.

Differentiate instruction-particularly for vulnerable students. For the vast majority of schools, the abrupt transition to online learning left little time to plan a strategy that could adequately meet every student's needs-in a recent survey by the Education Trust, only 24 percent of parents said that their child's school was providing materials and other resources to support students with disabilities, and a quarter of non-English-speaking students were unable to obtain materials in their own language. Teachers can work to ensure that the students on the margins get the support they need by taking stock of students' knowledge and skills, and differentiating instruction by giving them choices, connecting the curriculum to their interests, and providing them multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning.

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Covid-19's Impact on Students' Academic and Mental Well-Being

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The pandemic has revealed-and exacerbated-inequities that hold many students back. Here's how teachers can help.

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istock

A recent Gallup poll notes that three in 10 Americans delayed seeking medical care due to cost - a true testament as to why America needs to solve its health-care access crisis.

The notion that approximately 19 percent of all U.S. adults delayed treatment for serious or somewhat serious conditions or illness carries serious consequences particularly for diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and a myriad of other acute and chronic conditions that may be amenable to early diagnosis and treatment.

{mosads}Similar findings from a recent Care Payment survey send a clarion call that we need to fix our health-care delivery system now.

Each day people are deciding between seeking care or perhaps placing food on their tables. According to a recent New York Times story, Pam Leonard, a Wisconsin school teacher, deferred treatment for a palpable breast lump for fear of high deductibles. She was later diagnosed with breast cancer.

The fear of medical debt is real causing some to make such life-compromising decisions.

As newly elected officials usher in a new Congressional session, they will be challenged to find solutions to our nation's health-care crisis.

This is particularly important as findings from a Kaiser Family Foundation poll revealed that 71 percent of respondents voted health care as their top priority during the 2018 midterm election.

Results from a 2018 Harris Poll show that 54 percent of Americans delayed medical care in the past t2 months. Fifty-five percent delayed dental/ orthodontic work, 43 percent delayed eye care and 30 percent deferred annual exams. All of these areas of health if left unattended may lead to adverse outcomes including higher health-care costs and emotional distress.

Prescription drugs are also part of the expense of seeking care and perhaps a factor in delaying treatment. The growth of spending in this area is expected to grow an average of 6.3 percent per year in part due to increasing drug prices and also use of specialty drugs.

Health care providers frequently prescribe generic drugs or provide samples to patients as one means of addressing the high cost of prescription drugs, some of which may be lifesaving.

Many have heard of the horrid stories that lead to unforeseen medical bills. As nurses we have witnessed the devastating impact of delayed care on patients and families.

Caring for patients with uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes, for example, that has progressed to more severe complications is quite disheartening. The cost of living with these complications extends beyond high health-care costs but also influences quality and longevity of life.

Many patients are surprised by charges such as a facility fee just for walking in the door as opposed to the past where insurances would cover that fee. Add to that the costs of seeing out of network providers working at in network facilities and a patient can quickly incur thousands of dollars in medical debt.

Those of us in the health-care professions devote considerable time and resources to eliminating preventable harm or adverse events in health care, the trend of delays in seeking medical care is also a preventable harm in need of our immediate attention.
Janice Phillips RN PhD, is an associate professor at Rush University College of Nursing and the director of nursing research and health equity at the Rush University Medical Center. Maria Alonso BSN, s a board certified registered nurse at Rush Oak Park Hospital. Both are Public Voices fellows with The OpEd Project. ​

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Health-care access and delays: A true crisis in America

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A recent Gallup poll notes that three in 10 Americans delayed seeking medical care due to cost - a true testament as to why America needs to solve its health-care access crisis. The notion that approximately 19 percent of all U.S.

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Beliefs, values, interests-
- we can change the prices of housing
- we can make more housing units
- we can hike up prices
- how can we make more money

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victims- claim there a hundreds of thousands of people working for pornographic sites approving videos daily

Website companies- claim there are too many videos uploaded in a day to acknowledge if they are children or not

Law enforcement - trying to make sure all alienable rights are are being upheld toward both parties

People found guilty in child 🤬- Are claiming they are posting art and their amendments are protecting them

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< increase to the legal purchasing age

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. Editor's note: This story contains explicit language.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that it would be unconstitutional to increase the minimum age to buy assault-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old - a key proposal Uvalde parents have called for after an 18-year-old gunned down their children's school in May.

"It is clear that the gun control law that they are seeking in Uvalde - as much as they may want it - has already been ruled as unconstitutional," Abbott said at a reelection campaign event in Allen.

The gunman in Uvalde bought two AR-15-style rifles days after he turned 18, the legal purchasing age in Texas, and used those weapons to kill 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Democrats have asked for a special legislative session to increase the minimum age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle. Families of Uvalde victims and survivors also have pushed for a three-year increase to the legal purchasing age.

Caitlyne Gonzales, who was a fourth grader at Robb Elementary the day of the massacre, stood on the steps of the Capitol last week to call for gun restrictions: "You have to be 21 to buy a case of beer, but an 18 year old bought a gun to kill kids. That does not make sense."

Abbott at his Wednesday campaign event brought up court rulings against gun restrictions from the past three months, including a federal court in Fort Worth on Thursday that struck down a Texas law limiting adults under 21 from carrying handguns. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman wrote that the Second Amendment does not specify limits on age.

That came shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a century-old New York gun law in June that restricted concealed carry of handgun. In the last 13 years, as firearms have become more accessible in the state, Texas has had eight mass shootings.

But gun control group March for Our Lives said raising the age to buy an assault rifle is constitutional, and pointed to Rick Scott, former GOP governor in Florida, who raised the legal purchasing age in his state after the Parkland shooting.

A spokesperson for Beto O'Rourke, who is running against Abbott in November, said that if elected, O'Rourke would work with Republicans and Democrats to raise the minimum age for purchasing an assault-style weapon.

In the days after the shooting in Uvalde, Abbott was asked if he would consider banning assault-style weapons for 18-year-olds. The governor at the time appeared hesitant.

"Ever since Texas has been a state, an 18-year-old has had the ability to buy a long gun, a rifle. Since that time, it seems like it's only been in the past decade or two that we've had school shootings. For a century and a half, 18-year-olds could buy rifles and we didn't have school shootings. But we do," Abbott said. "Maybe we're focusing our attention on the wrong thing."

Abbott that day was immediately interrupted by state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, who said, "Your own colleagues are telling me, calling me and telling me an 18-year-old shouldn't have a gun. This is enough. Call us back, man."

"Simply doing nothing is about as evil as it comes," Gutierrez later said in June.

After seeing Abbott's response to calls to increase the purchasing age for assault-style rifles, Brett Cross, father of Uziyah Garcia, one of the students killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted a video on Twitter saying Uvalde parents did not matter to the governor. Cross said that in a meeting with Abbott, the governor had previously told him that raising the purchasing age would not have prevented a shooting.

"That piece of shit that murdered our children legally bought that damn gun. Legally," Cross said of the Uvalde shooter Wednesday. Addressing Abbott, he added: "You could do something about it. You're just too chicken shit to do it."
William Melhado contributed to this report. The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.

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Abbott says raising the age to buy an assault-style rifle is "unconstitutional" based on recent court rulings

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. Editor's note: This story contains explicit language. Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that it would be unconstitutional to increase the minimum age to buy assault-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old - a key proposal Uvalde parents have called for after an 18-year-old gunned down their children's school in May.

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Girls have much lower self-esteem in their teenage years and this can be partially attributed to ... [+]
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For many people, social media is just a part of their everyday life. You might rely on it for work opportunities or self-promotion. In lockdown, it's been a great way to keep up-to-date with what's going on in the lives of your loved ones or in the news. However, as your home, workplace and school all merged into one it's hard to get away from screens and switch off. A new study has found that girls have much lower self-esteem in their teenage years and this can be partially attributed to social media. While the research found that young people's mental health tended to worsen as they went through their teenage years, the wellbeing of girls was more severely impacted.

The Prince's Trust and the Education Policy Institute used data from the Millennium Cohort Study. Over a two-year period, they looked at the wellbeing of an estimated 5,000 young people who were born around 2000. Researchers spoke to the young people about their overall wellness and mental health when they were 11, 14, and 17.

They found that there was a distinct drop in girl's self-esteem and sense of self between the ages of 11 and 14. At 11, 15% said they felt unhappy about their appearance. However, by the time they were 14, 29% said they weren't happy.

Further research has linked much higher rates of depression in girls to longer time spent on social media and online bullying. A team from University College London used the same data set as the Prince's Trust and the Education Policy Institute and found that three-quarters of girls, aged 14, who suffer from low moods and depression also are unhappy with how they look and get less than seven hours sleep per night. Almost 40% of girls who spend more than five hours a day on social media show symptoms of depression.

Girl's and boy's mental wellness was pretty similar through primary school and it wasn't until 14 that there started to be marked differences. The pandemic had also had a big impact on the mental health and wellness of young people.

According to the mental health charity, Mind 68% of young people have said their mental health got worse during lockdown. "The transition from childhood to adolescence can be turbulent, and the findings of this report underline why addressing and supporting young people's mental health will only become more crucial as the impact of the pandemic unfolds," said Jonathan Townsend, chief executive of The Prince's Trust, "Young people are among the hardest hit by the pandemic, so it is more important than ever that they can access support with their mental health during this critical time in their lives."

The Prince's Trust and the Education Policy Institute concluded that while the transition from childhood to adolescence has a massive impact on your mental health and wellness, it is a particularly stark turning point for girls. Prevention is better than cure and the research suggested that more needs to be done to support young people, especially during the pandemic.

Their recommendations included building on existing mental health content in the Health Education and Relationships and Sex Education curriculum to discuss how conventional beauty standards spread online and address how some young people may be stigmatized for having different body types or gender expression. While it's crucial that young people know where they can get support, the organizations said that ensuring that young people have the language to verbalize how they feel to their friends is also so important.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

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Girls Have Much Lower Self-Esteem During Their Teen Years, According To New Study

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For many people, social media is just a part of their everyday life. You might rely on it for work opportunities or self-promotion. In lockdown, it's been a great way to keep up-to-date with what's going on in the lives of your loved ones or in the news.

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Is covid-19's pandemic raising child abuse?

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Entire families are sheltering at home, often in close quarters. Anxiety about health, education and finances is high. Children aren't seeing the teachers, counselors and other adults who would normally raise concerns about their well-being. The Covid-19 pandemic has created the conditions for a rise in child abuse that could go unchecked.

Already there are reports of a surge in suspected child abuse cases in Texas. We've seen this before during stressful times. During the 2008 recession, pediatricians reported a rise in infant injuries and deaths from abusive head trauma, a trend that lingered for years after the economy recovered.

When there is household dysfunction - domestic violence, parental substance abuse or a mental disorder - the risk of child abuse goes up, and there's reason to believe all of these things will increase during this pandemic. New York is seeing an uptick in domestic violence. Suicide hotline calls are up around the country. For as long as we're confined to our homes, many parents who are struggling with these issues will no longer have any reprieve from the hard work of keeping children fed, entertained and educated.

Children could be at risk for sexual violence in particular. An estimated one in four girls are sexually abused by age 18, and the abuse is typically perpetrated by a family member in the child's home. Too often, children disclose the abuse to their mothers but the perpetrator remains in the home because he is the primary breadwinner. I worry that our current reality - the lack of opportunities to seek refuge outside the home combined with the difficulty of finding new living arrangements when money is tight - makes it even less likely that young victims will be able to escape their abusers.

Typically, the watchful eyes of teachers, guidance counselors and day care providers serve as lifelines for vulnerable children. Educators are the primary source of reports ( 20 percent) to child protective services nationwide. A teacher might see slap marks on a student's face and make a report to authorities when the child, afraid of being taken away from his or her parents, provides inconsistent explanations for the injuries. A guidance counselor might meet with a teenager who is showing signs of depression and learn that the student's stepfather is sexually abusing him.

As a child abuse pediatrician, I typically see more cases in the fall because abuse that occurs during the summer often goes undetected. I expect that when this period of social distancing comes to an end, I'll see a similar surge.

People who are concerned about a particular family can help by doing small things to ease the stress that comes with this time. Small acts of support - whether in the form of food, toilet paper, coloring books or just an empathetic ear - can make a difference and ease parents' stress. Make use of technology for virtual check-ins. Look for signs of distress and remember that anyone can report concerns to child protective services, but also simply serve as a reassuring, reliable presence. Remember that social distancing doesn't have to mean emotional distancing.

Community organizers, faith-based leaders and elected officials should coordinate with mental health clinicians, social workers and counselors to conduct virtual check-ins with high-risk families, something that's already being done to some extent in New York City. They should form parent groups to conduct remote learning for children under 5, because those kids are at highest risk for abuse. They can work with recovery groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous provide online and video support. They can use social media to distribute help line numbers and to send the message to children that they aren't alone.

As part of virtual visits, child health providers should routinely ask families how they are doing and offer help. Just as fever is a warning sign of infection, physicians must recognize the warning signs of abuse.As doctors, we can share information on parent support, domestic violence, suicide hotlines with those who we think might be at risk and make sure to follow up by phone to see whether parents have questions. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers guidance to pediatricians on identifying, diagnosing and treating abusive head trauma and a tip sheet for parents dealing with the stresses of the coronavirus crisis.

This pandemic has brought with it additional challenges in protecting young people from abuse and revealed gaps in our existing approach. We have an opportunity to use new tools to ensure that children are safe - tools that will serve them during this crisis and long after.

Nina Agrawal is a child abuse pediatrician and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The Coronavirus Could Cause a Child Abuse Epidemic

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Entire families are sheltering at home, often in close quarters. Anxiety about health, education and finances is high. Children aren't seeing the teachers, counselors and other adults who would normally raise concerns about their well-being. The Covid-19 pandemic has created the conditions for a rise in child abuse that could go unchecked.

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Uvalde Mass shooting

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Carla Astudillo, Reese Oxner and Eric Neugeboren

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What we know, minute by minute, about how the Uvalde shooting and police response unfolded

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State officials provided a timeline of the massacre and have corrected crucial details amid public demands for information on how authorities handled the situation.

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-Victims
- Law Enforcement
-Citizens
- School Students
- Hunters
- Business Workers

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Six-in-ten U.S. adults say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today, up 9 percentage points from spring 2022.

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For aspiring homeowners, the housing market is a discouraging and confusing testament to the lack of affordable housing across the country.

Home ownership rates haven't yet recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and the median home price has risen 28 percent in the last two years as the pandemic accelerated existing trends in housing costs. However, income has not increased proportionally to the cost of a home. The median home costs 4.5 to 5 times the median household income in the U.S.

When it comes time to assign blame, it's important to understand the difference between private equity firm homebuying and real-estate company homebuying.

Understanding the current housing market means untangling a complex system of real estate advertisers, corporate homebuyers and how they compete with new homeowners. Social media attempts to provide answers.

Twitter threads and viral TikToks shed light on Zillow's home buying practices, accusing the real-estate company of manipulating prices in the already unaffordable housing market.

While it's true that Zillow attempts to profit by renovating and reselling homes at or slightly above market value, this company's practices are only a drop in the bucket of corporate homebuying.

When Zillow purchases a home to resell, it assumes the risk if the house does not sell at its listed price. When Zillow successfully resells above market value, it marginally contributes to the issue of rising home prices. However, this is not always the case.

The real issue emerges when companies buy homes not to resell, but to rent. Wall Street homebuying is one of the main drivers behind the affordable housing crisis. When companies - such as American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes - buy up single-family housing, they increase the price of homes by creating scarcity in the market.

Meanwhile, they act as corporate landlords, with rent prices at the mercy of Wall Street. The rental value of single-family homes has risen an estimated 15 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Additionally, conditions in these rental properties are notoriously poor, and corporate landlords are found to be far more likely to evict tenants - or use the threat of eviction to their advantage.

Invitation Homes, for example, is a property management company that was formed from Blackstone, a private equity firm. Invitation Homes is concentrated in the South, and owns properties in 16 U.S. cities.

Because of the company's expansive assets, Invitation Homes has the ability to get mortgages at significantly lower interest rates than the average homebuyer - 1.4 percent, compared to the average 2 to 4 percent.

When Invitation Homes makes an offer on a property, it also tends to make cash offers, which are particularly appealing in the current seller's market.

Twenty-two percent of home purchases in Charlotte are by investors. In contrast, nationally, one in five homes were sold to investors last year.

Although only one to two percent of these sales were by larger institutionally-backed investors, the increasing rate of acquisitions since the pandemic has proven that private equity firms are a powerful backbone to the single-family housing market - and are driving its scarcity.

The problem of corporate home buying is only growing more expansive, with little being done to mitigate the effects of single-family homes being converted into rental properties by private equity firms.

Major cities bear the brunt of corporate homebuying, and it has the potential to worsen in Orange and Durham Counties as the Triangle sees economic growth and development.

A lack of affordable housing anywhere is cause for concern.

Once we know where to place the blame, we can advocate for legislation that targets Wall Street and pension firms. Our state governments should prohibit or put caps on corporate home buying, especially when it comes to foreclosure auctions. For example, a 2020 California bill prevents the "bundling" of homes at foreclosure auctions.

Affordable housing should be subsidized at the local level, and heftier fines should be implemented for landlords of poorly maintained properties.

There is no Band-Aid fix to the institutionalized problems of the real estate market, which has historically discriminated against Black homeowners and opened the doors to predatory lending practices that led to the 2008 recession.

Still, these steps can protect prospective homeowners and reinstate the idea that affordable and quality housing is a right.
@dthopinion opinion@dailytarheel.com
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Editorial: Who's really behind the affordable housing crisis

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For aspiring homeowners, the housing market is a discouraging and confusing testament to the lack of affordable housing across the country. Home ownership rates haven't yet recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and the median home price has risen 28 percent in the last two years as the pandemic accelerated existing trends in housing costs.

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< “You have to be 21 to buy a case of beer, but an 18 year old bought a gun to kill kids. That does not make sense.”

< “You could do something about it. You’re just too chicken 🤬 to do it.”

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. Editor's note: This story contains explicit language.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that it would be unconstitutional to increase the minimum age to buy assault-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old - a key proposal Uvalde parents have called for after an 18-year-old gunned down their children's school in May.

"It is clear that the gun control law that they are seeking in Uvalde - as much as they may want it - has already been ruled as unconstitutional," Abbott said at a reelection campaign event in Allen.

The gunman in Uvalde bought two AR-15-style rifles days after he turned 18, the legal purchasing age in Texas, and used those weapons to kill 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Democrats have asked for a special legislative session to increase the minimum age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle. Families of Uvalde victims and survivors also have pushed for a three-year increase to the legal purchasing age.

Caitlyne Gonzales, who was a fourth grader at Robb Elementary the day of the massacre, stood on the steps of the Capitol last week to call for gun restrictions: "You have to be 21 to buy a case of beer, but an 18 year old bought a gun to kill kids. That does not make sense."

Abbott at his Wednesday campaign event brought up court rulings against gun restrictions from the past three months, including a federal court in Fort Worth on Thursday that struck down a Texas law limiting adults under 21 from carrying handguns. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman wrote that the Second Amendment does not specify limits on age.

That came shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a century-old New York gun law in June that restricted concealed carry of handgun. In the last 13 years, as firearms have become more accessible in the state, Texas has had eight mass shootings.

But gun control group March for Our Lives said raising the age to buy an assault rifle is constitutional, and pointed to Rick Scott, former GOP governor in Florida, who raised the legal purchasing age in his state after the Parkland shooting.

A spokesperson for Beto O'Rourke, who is running against Abbott in November, said that if elected, O'Rourke would work with Republicans and Democrats to raise the minimum age for purchasing an assault-style weapon.

In the days after the shooting in Uvalde, Abbott was asked if he would consider banning assault-style weapons for 18-year-olds. The governor at the time appeared hesitant.

"Ever since Texas has been a state, an 18-year-old has had the ability to buy a long gun, a rifle. Since that time, it seems like it's only been in the past decade or two that we've had school shootings. For a century and a half, 18-year-olds could buy rifles and we didn't have school shootings. But we do," Abbott said. "Maybe we're focusing our attention on the wrong thing."

Abbott that day was immediately interrupted by state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, who said, "Your own colleagues are telling me, calling me and telling me an 18-year-old shouldn't have a gun. This is enough. Call us back, man."

"Simply doing nothing is about as evil as it comes," Gutierrez later said in June.

After seeing Abbott's response to calls to increase the purchasing age for assault-style rifles, Brett Cross, father of Uziyah Garcia, one of the students killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted a video on Twitter saying Uvalde parents did not matter to the governor. Cross said that in a meeting with Abbott, the governor had previously told him that raising the purchasing age would not have prevented a shooting.

"That piece of shit that murdered our children legally bought that damn gun. Legally," Cross said of the Uvalde shooter Wednesday. Addressing Abbott, he added: "You could do something about it. You're just too chicken shit to do it."
William Melhado contributed to this report. The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.

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Abbott says raising the age to buy an assault-style rifle is "unconstitutional" based on recent court rulings

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. Editor's note: This story contains explicit language. Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that it would be unconstitutional to increase the minimum age to buy assault-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old - a key proposal Uvalde parents have called for after an 18-year-old gunned down their children's school in May.

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Ever since Trump began the construction of a wall at the Mexico-U.S. border, there has been a controversy on the influx of immigrants and migrants. Many people are divided on whether the issue is all the people trying to come onto the U.S or if it's how we're handling them in asylums

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In the darker corners of our American cities, there has recently, sprung up a trade in pornography, literary as well as pictorial, of which the merchants of Hamburg and Yokohama might well be envious, and privately, or perhaps not so privately, there are those who find this not such a bad thing; no worse, at any rate, than some other branches of American commerce, and in its ingenuous appeal to an undoubted human need perhaps even preferable to those more subtle or devious demands on our sensibilities on behalf of this or that automobile or brand of cigarettes. In any case, we are assaulted each day by the news of what horrors we commit in the name of social responsibility and for the sake of economic growth, of our casual murders along the highways, of the consuming death with which we threaten the world, foretastes of which we and the other civilized nations have delivered already; and we are bound to wonder how, in the face of all this, mere sexuality, even in its most contorted versions, can still seem such an embarrassment or danger to us all.

The question, of course, is not new. It was, after all, in the generation of our grandfathers that Freud explained the terrible power that resides within our sexuality and how we must subdue and sacrifice this power in order to live in civilized society; that in exchange for the sexuality which we thus suppress we are able to divert our energies and use them to build our families, our cities, and our cultures. But Freud also warned that this great sacrifice may be more than most of us can bear and that our private deformations, whether overt or expressed in fantasy, reflect the reluctance with which we imperfectly and grudgingly give this part of ourselves over to the world at large Moreover, the notion has lately arisen, and by now become a commonplace, that not only may society ask too much of us, but, what is worse, it abuses what we give it; that by some process or other, society now transforms the energies which it takes from us and produces something quite different from the culture we had come to expect. Instead, we find ourselves trapped in a collective nightmare of choking cities, crashing cars, and exploding bombs, so that our civilization, on whose behalf we have individually sacrificed so much, finds its symbolic counterpart in a madhouse from which we now lack the power to escape.

Such, in any case, and in the briefest summary, is how much of modern literature looks upon the world and why its argument has so often been that we must recapture, if it is not too late, whatever parts of ourselves may still be salvaged from the wreck of our culture. It is from this vision or attitude that certain modern writers have mounted their attack on our sexual taboos and the myths that support them, as well as on the laws through which these myths are expressed. It is, I suspect, from a corresponding if unstated attitude within society as a whole that much of our recent permissiveness toward pornography derives.

Similarly we find that along with the increasingly overt sexuality of much of our literature, our very lives - in private at least, if not yet in public - and especially the lives of the young, in their dress and their dancing and in their increasingly violent rejection of established authority, reflect this new hand sometimes desperate, often sadly self-conscious, probably doomed attempt to retrieve or withhold from society what it has for so long demanded as kits price of admission.

From this perspective, the recent tendency of the Supreme Court in questions of obscenity, and especially its decision to lift the ban against Fanny Hill, call for more than merely our respect. Given the Court's position at the center of society, its decisions - so painfully rendered and as inarticulate, contradictory, and ambiguous as they often are - reflect what later ages may recognize as political genius of a specially courageous sort. Whether consciously or not, the Court seems to be agreeing, within the limits of its authority and comprehension, that mankind must have the second chance that our writers, from Blake and Lawrence to Freud and Norman O. Brown, have been demanding.

In such a summary as this I have inevitably simplified a most complex case, and no doubt in the point of view of Ralph Ginzburg, as he contemplates his immediate future, the distortions must seem horrendous. To him I owe, if not an apology, then at least an explanation. The fact is that his present difficulties, frightful and cruel as they are, might not have arisen had he sensed how very seriously the Court has come to regard literary sexuality and how very deeply, if also ambiguously, it has come to share with certain modern writers the obligation - which it may not recognize as such at all - to rid the question of sexuality of the mythologies, secular as well as sacred, by which it has for so long been haunted, distorted, and trivialized.

The Court decided the Ginzburg case, appropriately on the first day of spring, and as everyone knows confirmed the barbaric five-year sentence imposed by Judge Body of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the ribald implications of whose name hardly suggest the bleak piety with which he viewed Ginzburg's transgressions. Judge Body ruled that Ginzburg had used the mails to distribute obscene publications in violation of a federal statute, and he based his verdict partly on an argument by the federal prosecutor that no matter how hard it might be to define obscenity in the light of recent Supreme Court decisions, Ginzburg had considerably simplified matters in his own case by admitting in advance, through his five million or so direct-mail circulars, that his goods were, as Justice Brennan was later to write in upholding Judge Body's verdict, "created, represented and sold solely as a claimed instrument of the sexual stimulation [they] would bring." In other words, Ginzburg had convicted himself long before his case had come to court. Whether his publications were intrinsically obscene or not, Ginzburg sold them as if they were and thus, according to the Supreme Court, left himself without a defense.

For Ginzburg and his lawyers, as indeed for many others who followed the case, this reading of the law came as a surprise and has since become a source of consternation, especially among publishers who feel themselves at a loss to understand the Court's position. From lawyers too there has been much criticism of the Court's decision, and Justice Black in his dissent argued that Ginzburg had been unfairly trapped by the unusual line of attack which the Court was pursuing. In his decision for the majority, however, Justice Brennan anticipated this objection by pointing out that "the trial transcript clearly reveals that at several points the Government announced its theory that made the mode of distribution relevant to the determination of obscenity and the trial court admitted evidence otherwise irrelevant toward that end."

The fact is that the Court, and especially the Chief Justice, seem to have had some such theory in mind for at least a decade. At any rate, it was in 1957 in a concurring opinion in the Roth decision, from which much of our legal theory of pornography now derives, that Chief Justice Warren suggested that the mode of distribution was in fact relevant to the question of obscenity, that it is not a book that is on trial, it is a person. Had Ginzburg and his lawyers heeded this warning - had they sensed that while the Court was in the process of abandoning the idea of intrinsic obscenity it would nevertheless substitute for it an evaluation of the publisher's motives - he would very likely not be in jail this summer.

Ginzburg was correct, of course, in assuming that the Court was hopelessly entangled in the complex problem of establishing a definition of obscenity which could be reconciled with the First Amendment and that it was thus forced to extricate itself by taking an increasingly liberal position, whose outcome could only be the gradual abandonment of any attempt to define literary pornography. By the time Ginzburg put his circulars in the mail the Court seemed to have made it all but impossible to sustain a conviction in a literary obscenity case except perhaps where so-called hard-core pornography was concerned; and even here no one seemed to know what hard-core pornography, as opposed presumably to soft or peripheral pornography, was supposed to be. For a work to be considered obscene, the prosecution had to prove first that it was patently offensive, that it was without social value, and that to the average reader, applying the standards of the community, the work as a whole was addressed to the prurient interest of its readers. And, as the Court was to affirm in its decision on Fanny Hill, which was rendered on the same day as the Ginzburg decision, each of these criteria had to be met simultaneously.

A patently offensive work, which an average reader might feel was in fact addressed to prurient interest - which, as the Court has also made clear, is indescribably nastier than merely sexual interest - might still be protected under the First Amendment if it could be found to have the slightest redeeming social importance. As Justice Brennan wrote in reversing the judgment against Fanny Hill,, a work, no matter how offensive, must be utterly (his italics) without redeeming social importance before it can be proscribed. In these circumstances, no wonder Ginzburg protested his innocence, for even Justice Brennan in upholding Judge Body's verdict specifically refused to grant the contention of the lower court that what Ginzburg published was, in itself, obscene. "The conviction," Justice Brennan wrote, "does not necessarily suppress the materials in question nor chill their proper distribution for a proper use."

In thus becoming the unhappy instrument by which the three criteria that the Court has established for the determination of obscenity are now amplified by or enclosed within a fourth, Ginzburg, it seems to me, is not, as he insists, a martyr to the cause of free expression so much as to the Court's anguished and complex efforts to preserve free expression while still suppressing those publishers who, in their zeal or greed or foolishness, might exploit this freedom excessively, if not clearly to the detriment of the body politic, at least to the embarrassment of the Court itself. In the Ginzburg and Fanny Hill decisions, the Court has said, in effect, that we are indeed free at last under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to express ourselves, in print at least, as we please, but we are warned that this is also a dangerous freedom and not to be used irresponsibly. Above all, we must not give the Court cause to regret its increasingly liberal stand.

The Court's present position was argued at length some five years earlier in an article published in the Utah Law Review for spring, 1961, written by Dean Lockhart of the University of Utah Law School and Robert C. McClure, professor of law at the University of Minnesota. In this article, which severely criticizes the Court's position on obscenity as of that time for its many obscurities and especially for its dependence upon a definition of pornography which no court could possibly establish, the authors proposed as an alternative "that censorship should not depend upon the intrinsic nature of the material independent of its audience and method of marketing. Instead it should depend upon manner in which it is marketed and the primary audience to which it is sold." Presumably one the aims of Lockhart and McClure was to amplify the argument which Chief Justice Warren had suggested in 1957. Thus, while Lady Chaterley's Lover is clearly not obscene in itself, it would become obscene according to these authors if were sold, for example, to high school students for its sexual interest alone.

No doubt this article found its way to the Supreme Court (Justice Douglas refers to it in his dissenting opinion in Ginzburg), and it may even have provided the basis for Ginzburg's prosecution in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. From a somewhat paranoid perspective, one might even assume a degree of collusion between the Court and the federal prosecutor, if not for the purpose of trapping Ginzburg, then possibly in order to test the new hypothesis. At any rate, Lockhart and McClure clearly anticipated the present position of the majority of the Court, and their article supports the Court's current theory that while books themselves are protected under the Constitution, booksellers are not.

If the Fanny Hill decision finally disposes of the idea of intrinsic obscenity, the Ginzburg decision, with its roots in Justice Warren's position as elaborated by Lockhart and McClure, raises still other questions to which the Court so far has supplied no answers. It is, for example, only by the most whimsical logic that Lady Chatterley's Lover becomes obscene in one context while in another it is unobjectionable, or that Ginzburg's publications become obscene because Ginzburg publishes them, while if a more respectable or circumspect merchant sells them, they remain pure.

Conversely, would the Book of Job, under the present ruling, become obscene if it were sold for its sadomasochistic interest alone? Could the Court legitimately punish a bookseller for exploiting this aspect of such an ordinarily innocent work? Or will the Autobiography of a Flea become a legitimate publication if only the Harvard University Press brings it out? As absurd as it may appear, this is approximately how the Court seems to have left matters.

It is as if the Court had now asked us to return to the standards of the last century when pornography was allowed to circulate more or less freely among upper-class males in the privacy of their clubs or studies but was forbidden to women, children, servants, and the working class generally, who were presumed not to be sexual beings at all. The question now is whether, in having restricted pornography to a privileged class of presumably mature and therefore immune readers, the Court has in fact simplified matters for itself - as well as for writers, publishers, librarians, and booksellers - or whether it has merely translated the problem into another language as obscure and dangerous as the first.

In the Ginzburg decision, at any rate, one senses far beneath the legal surface of the case an argument which appears to stem, however remotely, from something like class bias. In its choice of such prejudicial epithets as "pandering" and "the leer of the sensualist" to describe Ginzburg's activities, the Court seems to be saying that Ginzburg's crime was no more than a function of his personality or character: that he was a vulgarian, and that therefore he had no right to trade in a market whose delicate and dangerous products must be limited only to gentlemen and scholars. Such an ad hominem judgment can hardly have been what the Court intended, no matter how the obscurity and occasional passion of Justice Brennan's language may seem to support such an interpretation.

From the point of view of serious literature it can only be beneficial that the Court has now rejected the idea of intrinsic obscenity and has thus moved closer than Justices Black and Douglas seem willing, in their dissents, to admit to the view that the First Amendment should be interpreted without restriction where literary expression is concerned. From the narrower interests of publishers and booksellers, however, the new ruling is bound to be troublesome until the Court provides clarification. For this reason. as well as for whatever personal sympathy one may have for Ginzburg and his family, one wishes that Ginzburg had been granted the new trial which he and his lawyers had requested. If Justice Brennan's decision has opened the door even a crack to the prosecution of any publisher or bookseller who happens also to be a vulgarian, then for the sake of us all that door must be shut imme-diately.

Meanwhile, for whatever small comfort one may take from the fact, one notices with pleasure the Court has agreed to consider the case of a New York newsstand clerk who was arrested for selling obscene magazines so as to determine whether a salesman can be convicted under the new ruling without clear proof that he knew that what he was selling was obscene. One assumes that if the Court itself no longer knows how to define obscenity, it can hardly expect the clerk to do any better. Perhaps it will be on these epistemological rocks that the law will finally have to admit defeat and accept the views of Justices Black and Douglas, if only to extricate itself from an impossible problem of definition. Until such time we shall have to live with the ambiguities that remain, and that will remain in whatever measure, no matter what the Court decides, as long as sexuality retains its terrifying power.

Even so, the Court, it seems to me, has so far acted reasonably, though perhaps without that God--like intelligence and mercy which some of its critics expect of it. Though one's sympathies are with Justices Black and Douglas, one still recognizes that such sympathies seldom coincide with political reality. It is enough, perhaps, for now that the Court has come as far as it has and that in having come this far it is within sight, though it may still be facing in somewhat the wrong direction, of that brave land where so far Justices Black and Douglas have been the only inhabitants.

Whether the majority of the Court will ever join these two heroic voyagers is, of course, impossible to predict, and the accidents of life and death compound the puzzle. Even so, the days of literary censorship seem to me to be substantially over, and the burden on publishers and booksellers to maintain a certain minimum decorum, at least until the public accustoms itself to this new freedom, seems hardly too much to ask.

I should not, however, like to conclude on such an agreeable note, for it would be misleading to suggest that what the Court decides the people will necessarily accept. There are those among us who will continue to claim more freedom than the Court has so far allowed, and there are others who, despite the freedom so far granted, will insist on restrictions which the Court has now disapproved.

Within each of us too there is bound to remain a private version of the same conflict. We cannot have been born into a civilization such as ours, which for so many centuries has labored under such sexual dread and mystery, without finding ourselves implicated in our culture's general distortion of instincts and values. None of us is yet prepared to walk naked on the streets, as the Etruscans once did or as the Greeks did in their games, no matter what encouragement such writers as Blake and Lawrence, or Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, or the fashion magazines, may provide. The world is still full of sheriffs whose grasp of the law, in its endless subtlety, will always be imperfect, and within the head of each of us, even within the heads of our most radical friends, there sits a tiny Madame de Gaulle saying no to this or that.

Yet the pressure within our culture toward greater sexual freedom, and its reflection in the Court's decision to trust us now not to debauch ourselves even within the embrace of Fanny Hill, may prophesy a change. Or it may not. We shall know better when the films - a more likely medium than books - begin to assert such freedom as up to now only literature has dared risk.

At any rate, we know from Marx as well as from Freud, and from our reading of the Calvinists and the interpretation of their motives in the work of Max Weber, that there is a historic connection between sexual regulation and economic necessity, a connection which is evident even now in such a society as China's, where the demand for rapid capital formation requires severe restrictions upon sexual behavior, so that work takes precedence over marriage and even within marriage the demands of the state override the preferences of its individual members.

In America and Europe we are beyond some of that necessity, as reluctant as most of us, still trapped in the habits and illusions generated by centuries of privation, may be to admit it. Such freedom is also terrifying, and in our terror we may arrange things so that none of us will survive to enjoy it. Even so, the prospect is there, no matter how obscure and uncertain the path to it may be. One regrets that Ralph Ginzburg must now prison for having done no more than try to see a merely vulgar imitation of this future paradise. But such regrets are for Ginzburg personally and not for our society as a whole. The Court, in having acquiesced in such unprecedented freedom for literature, seems to me to have foreshadowed a time in which that obsessive sexuality, so distorted by years of privation and the prior claims of struggle to survive, which has so permeated only our literature but our lives, may eventually recede - as some of our other devils have - into a more manageable and less maddening perspective. At any rate, the choice hereafter is more nearly up to us as individuals than it has ever been before, which is to say that our responsibilities have never been greater.

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The tortuous, not altogether articulate attempt of the Supreme Court to deal with the growing traffic in obscenity and pornography must be examined in detail if its latest decision, scrutinizing the motives of authors, editors, publishers, and booksellers, is to be understood.

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1477971420947738

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Cartel's violence causes immigrants to flood into United States' border states- Michael Bowen

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Cartel's violence causes immigrants to flood into United States' border states- Michael Bowen

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Immigrants, families from Mexico, border states, governors, United States border patrol, homeland security, political figures and parties

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With Cartels Looming, The Border Crisis Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

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Amid record numbers of illegal border-crossers, a larger crisis looms in Mexico with dire implications for the United States.

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Serena K. Fleites, 19, was 14 when a boy she had a crush on asked her to make a naked video and send it to him. She did, and it ended up on Pornhub. Credit... Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times

Opinion
Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?

Serena K. Fleites, 19, was 14 when a boy she had a crush on asked her to make a naked video and send it to him. She did, and it ended up on Pornhub. Credit... Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times

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This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.
Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

That supposedly "wholesome Pornhub" attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon. Pornhub rakes in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th-most-visited website in the world.

Yet there's another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for "girls under18" (no space) or "14yo" leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren't of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub - in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it's impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.

Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from its website. So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again.

"Pornhub became my trafficker," a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.

"I'm still getting sold, even though I'm five years out of that life," Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer - but those old videos hang over her.

"I may never be able to get away from this," she said. "I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos."

"You type 'Young Asian' and you can probably find me," she added.

Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search. That doesn't count videos that show up under "related searches" that Pornhub suggests, including "young tiny teen," "extra small petite teen," "tiny Asian teen" or just "young girl." Nor does it necessarily count videos on a Pornhub channel called "exploited teen Asia."

The issue is not pornography but rape. Let's agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable. The problem with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein was not the sex but the lack of consent - and so it is with Pornhub.

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like "Screaming Teen," "Degraded Teen" and "Extreme Choking." Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for "She Can't Breathe."

It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.

Pornhub declined to make executives available on the record, but it provided a statement. "Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community," it said. Pornhub added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site "is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue."

At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. "That's when I started getting strange looks in school," she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites's world imploded. It's tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. "People were texting me, if I didn't send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom," she said.

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Serena Fleites, now living in her car with three dogs, says, "A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake." Credit... Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times

The boy was suspended, but Fleites began skipping class because she couldn't bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, and Fleites switched schools. But rumors reached the new school, and soon the videos were uploaded again to Pornhub and other websites.

Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.

Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.

As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.

At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, "I'm not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body," she told me.

Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says - but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn't sure how to get there. "It's kind of hard to go to school when you're living in a car with dogs," she said.

"I was dumb," she acknowledged, noting that she had never imagined that the videos could be shared online. "It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it's crazy how it turns into something so much bigger.

"A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake."

The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.

Google returns 920 million videos on a search for "young porn." Top hits include a video of a naked "very young teen" engaging in sex acts on XVideo along with a video on Pornhub whose title is unprintable here.

I asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to compile the number of images, videos and other content related to child sexual exploitation reported to it each year. In 2015, it received reports of 6.5 million videos or other files; in 2017, 20.6 million; and in 2019, 69.2 million.

Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure. "Eliminating illegal content is an ongoing battle for every modern content platform, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront," Pornhub said in its statement.

The Internet Watch Foundation couldn't explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it's because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it's possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including "less than 18," "the best collection of young boys" and "under- - age."

Congress and successive presidents have done almost nothing as this problem has grown. The tech world that made it possible has been mostly passive, in a defensive crouch. But pioneering reporting in 2019 by my Times colleagues has prodded Congress to begin debating competing strategies to address child exploitation.

Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called on the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub. PayPal cut off services for the company, and credit card companies have been asked to do the same. An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down. Twenty members of Canada's Parliament have called on their government to crack down on Pornhub, which is effectively based in Montreal.

"They made money off my pain and suffering," an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. "I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall," she added, weeping as she spoke. "They were laughing."

Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Pornhub and Mindgeek also stand out because of their influence. One study this year by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third greatest-impact on society in the 21st century, after Facebook and Google but ahead of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Nominally based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, Mindgeek is a private company run from Montreal. It does not disclose who owns it, but it is led by Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both Canadians, who declined to be interviewed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government's efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?

Mindgeek's moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

"The goal for a content moderator is to let as much content as possible go through," a former Mindgeek employee told me. He said he believed that the top executives weren't evil but were focused above all on maximizing revenue.

While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

The moderators fast forward through videos, but it's often difficult to assess whether a person is 14 or 18, or whether torture is real or fake. Most of the underage content involves teenagers, the moderator I spoke with said, but some comes from spy cams in toilets or changing rooms and shows children only 8 to 12.

"The job in itself is soul-destroying," the moderator said.

Pornhub appears to be increasingly alarmed about civil or criminal liability. Lawyers are circling, and nine women sued the company in federal court after spy cam videos surfaced on Pornhub. The videos were shot in a locker room at Limestone College in South Carolina and showed women showering and changing clothes.

Mindgeek's headquarters in Montreal. Credit... Alexi Hobbs for The New York Times

Executives of Pornhub appear in the past to have assumed that they enjoyed immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms on which members of the public post content. But in 2018 Congress limited Section 230 so that it may not be enough to shield the company, leading Mindgeek to behave better.

It has doubled the number of moderators in the last couple of years, the moderator told me, and this year Pornhub began voluntarily reporting illegal material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After previously dragging its feet in removing videos of children and nonconsensual content, Pornhub now is responding more rapidly.

It has also compiled a list of banned content. I obtained a copy of this list, and it purports to bar videos with terms or themes like "rape," "preteen," "pedophilia" and "bestiality" (it helpfully clarifies that this "includes eels, fish, octopus, insects"). Diapers are OK "if no scatophilia." Mutilation depends on context but "cannot depict severing parts of the body."

So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like "underage" or "rape," the company hasn't tried hard to eliminate such videos. A member called "13yoboyteen" is allowed to post videos. A search for "r*pe," turns up 1,901 videos. "Girl with braces" turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying "exxxtra small teens." A search for "13yo" generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren't of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they're promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.

Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. "Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets" is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.

While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled "Junior High School Girl After Class" and shows what appears to be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just taken down, was labeled: "Beautiful High School Girl Is Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped."

"They're making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body," a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.

In the last few days as I was completing this article, two new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who was suicidal after it went online. I don't see how good-faith moderators could approve any of these videos.

Naked videos she made as a minor continue to haunt Fleites on Pornhub. Credit... Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times

"It's always going to be online," Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. "That's my big fear of having kids, them seeing this."

That's a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.

Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

"Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?" Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. "You really need a better system. ... I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website."

Nicole's lawyer, Dani Pinter, says there are still at least three naked videos of Nicole at age 15 or 16 on Pornhub that they are trying to get removed.

"It's never going to end," Nicole said. "They're getting so much money from our trauma."

Pornhub has introduced software that supposedly can "fingerprint" rape videos and prevent them from being uploaded again. But Vice showed how this technology is easily circumvented on Pornhub.

One Pornhub scandal involved the Girls Do Porn production company, which recruited young women for clothed modeling gigs and then pushed them to perform in sex videos, claiming that the videos would be sold only as DVDs in other countries and would never go online. Reassured that no one would ever know, some of the women agreed - and then were shattered when the footage was aggressively marketed on Pornhub.

Girls Do Porn was prosecuted for sex trafficking and shut down. But those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub; last time I checked, videos of six victims of Girls Do Porn were on Pornhub, which continues to profit from them.

One of the Girls Do Porn women I saw on Pornhub is now dead. She was murdered at 20, allegedly by an angry ex-boyfriend who is about to go on trial. I'm not disclosing her name because she should be remembered as a vibrant college athlete, and not for a sex video that represented her most mortifying moment.

So what's the solution?

I had expected the survivors to want to shut down Pornhub and send its executives to prison. Some did, but others were more nuanced. Lydia, now 20, was trafficked as a child and had many rape videos posted on the site. "My stomach hurts all the time" from the tension, she told me, but she doesn't want to come across as hostile to porn itself.

"I don't want people to hear 'No porn!'" Lydia told me. "It's more like, 'Stop hurting kids.'"

Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.

Jessica Shumway, who was trafficked and had a customer post a sex video on Pornhub, agrees: "They need to figure out who's underage in the videos and that there's consent from everybody in it."

I asked Leo, 18, who had videos of himself posted on Pornhub when he was 14, what he suggested.

"That's tough," he said. "My solution would be to leave porn to professional production companies," because they require proof of age and consent.

Right now, those companies can't compete with mostly free sites like Pornhub and XVideos.

"Pornhub has already destroyed the business model for pay sites," said Stoya, an adult film actress and writer. She, too, thinks all platforms - from YouTube to Pornhub - should require proof of consent to upload videos of private individuals.

Columnists are supposed to offer answers, but I struggle with solutions. If Pornhub curated videos more rigorously, the most offensive material might just move to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries. Yet at least they would then not be normalized on a mainstream site.

More pressure and less impunity would help. We're already seeing that limiting Section 230 immunity leads to better self-policing.

And call me a prude, but I don't see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

I don't see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.

These measures wouldn't kill porn or much bother consumers of it; YouTube thrives without downloads. Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub, told me that my three proposals are "insanely reasonable."

The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we prosecute individuals like Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly. But we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children. With Pornhub, we have Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
HOLIDAY-GIVING UPDATE: Many thanks to my readers, who have donated more than $4.2 million to the three organizations in my annual holiday giving guide column two weeks ago. One of the nonprofits sends girls to school in sub-Saharan Africa; another helps low-income American students finish high school and begin college; and a third restores sight to people with cataracts in Asia and Africa. More information is at KristofImpact.org.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The Children of Pornhub (Published 2020)

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Opinion Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault? Serena K. Fleites, 19, was 14 when a boy she had a crush on asked her to make a naked video and send it to him. She did, and it ended up on Pornhub. Credit...