The Vision of
Project Wilberforce™

Project Wilberforce™

The Project Wilberforce campaigns were designed to end the internet-enabled sexual exploitation of children and adults and restore a culture of civility, dignity and respect in America. Each campaign, which began in 2014, is making great strides in raising awareness of the social costs of internet pornography as a fueling factor in the sexual exploitation of children, violence against women, pornography addiction, the breakdown of marriage, sexual predation and sex trafficking. Project Wilberforce™ has emerged as a movement with the national success of the following Project Wilberforce™ campaigns:

• The Public Health Pornography Pandemic Campaign: the campaign continues to fuel the growing movement to shed light on the social costs and corroding influence of Internet pornography as a public health epidemic.
• Recovering Hearts Program for Faith-based Cultures: the Recovering Hearts initiative serves as a blueprint for the faith-based community designed to restore wholeness, purity, and dignity within the church.
• Porn-Free Wi-Fi Campaign (Now “Safe WiFi℠”): a call to voluntarily offer safe Wi-Fi in cafes, restaurants, shopping malls, theme parks and other public venues in the United States.
• The Presidential Pledge: a pledge from our presidential candidates to hold law enforcement and government accountable by aggressively enforcing our existing laws designed to protect kids from pornography, child pornography, sexual predators and traffickers.
• The “High Road” Campaign: the “High Road campaign” is designed to confront the global epidemic of hate and cyber bullying by promoting civility, common decency and kindness.

Since 1994, Enough Is Enough^® (EIE) has aggressively pressed forward in the battle to prevent the sexual exploitation of children from internet pornography and sexual predators. Like William Wilberforce, who pushed for social change and longed to make the world a better place, we have the ability to create a better world, a “beloved” community in which all people are respected with dignity.

The two main life goals of Wilberforce were to abolish slavery (a social evil) and to restore manners and decency (a social good) in England. It took Wilberforce and his band of friends, the Clapham circle, a lifetime to bring about such grand and revolutionary social change and abolish lesser social ills such as child labor.

Noble and worthwhile causes such as these often take a lifetime and include a strong network of devoted individuals and groups. Inspired by William Wilberforce’s desire for social change and for a better world, EIE chose the name “Project Wilberforce,” reflective of its own efforts to make the internet safer for children and families and win the war against pornography. Its basis is centered on the resurgence of the respective roles of the internet industry and government to be more pro-active in helping to achieve these goals.

This change is needed and, indeed, is possible. Just like the two-pronged Wilberforce model, EIE’s model fights against social evil and promotes social good, and is reflected in its mission as it relates to online safety:

• Social evil—as it includes the harms of pornography and its related “porneia” issues (child pornography, sexual predation, pedophilia, sex trafficking, and the overall sex industry).
• Social good—as it promotes a culture where all people are respected and valued and includes a childhood reflective of a protected age of innocence, healthy sexuality, and society free from sexual exploitation, particularly in the digital arena.

Of note, “porneia” means sexual immorality; therefore, pornography is the graphic depiction of such immorality. Graphic hard-core pornography has grown increasingly worse and more widespread over the years. As such, it is an epidemic worldwide and has fueled such vile evils such as sexual slavery and the growing three-billion-dollar child pornography industry, with the internet as its primary distribution medium.

EIE’s mission to “Making the Internet safer for Children and Families” has been a 30-year-plus marathon, not a sprint. The dream of EIE’s first President, Dee Jepsen, to “change the way America thinks about pornography” has seemed impossible, until now. Many foundational bricks have been laid to set the stage for positive change, but these efforts have been stymied by multiple challenges, including:

• The failure of the U.S. federal obscenity statutes to be enforced;
• The overturn of the Child Online Protection Act (1998) by the Supreme Court in 2009 (COPA shut down the law designed to protect minor children from pornography by requiring porn websites to utilize age verification);
• The underutilization of parental controls and filters by parents on Internet enabled-devices used by children
• Open access Wi-Fi in the public square

Despite these challenges and the fact that federal obscenity statutes have not been aggressively enforced, numerous peer-reviewed research studies continue to reveal the indisputable harms of pornography on children, women, men, health and culture, and the problem is getting worse. Children are getting exposed at younger ages resulting in a negative impact on the generations growing up with a steady diet of hardcore extreme pornography.

(NIH 2021 study) “From around 2008, the availability of internet pornography through mobile technology created the ideal conditions of Cooper’s triple-A engine, namely, that pornography is accessible, affordable and anonymous [1]. It has led to intensified and accelerated online sexual activity. Today pornography is mostly delivered through the device in one’s pocket.

Problematic Pornography Use (PPU) not only affects the user but can also influence their behaviour towards others. High levels of PPU affect the way society functions. Over the past decade, substantial academic literature has developed which indicates clear relationships between the consumption of pornography, particularly violent pornography, and the behaviour of men and children towards women and children [7–10]]. Pornography use, both in legal and illegal forms, can be a contributing factor in crimes such as the possession of indecent images of children or the consumption of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) [11–16]. It can also increase the likelihood and severity of rape, domestic violence, sexual assault, sharing of personal intimate images without consent, cyber flashing, sexual harassment and online harassment [17–22].”

Other nations have already taken a stand and said “enough is enough!” In 2013, Great Britain’s former prime minister, David Cameron, initiated a similar model to “Project Wilberforce,” which aligns with EIE’s proposed ISP Code of Ethical Conduct that called on industry to adopt voluntary filtering settings (introduced at the Children’s Online Summit in 1997). (ISP CODE OF CONDUCT) Additionally, Iceland, Russia and other nations have already implemented measures to stop the free flow of pornography via the Internet’s public airways.

The key concept of the UK model is for internet service and WiFi providers to set the filtering defaults “on” to filter pornography rather than “off”. Key aspects of the UK model include the following:

• “Internet enabled devices or internet-based services sold or supplied into the consumer market and likely to be owned or used by children or young people should, by default, come with filtering and blocking software preinstalled and operational to provide protection against exposure to adult content. An age-verified adult ought to be able to modify the preinstalled protective program settings or abandon them altogether, otherwise the defaults should remain”;
• “UK-based web hosting companies should ensure publishers making pornography available within the UK have an effective age verification process in place.”

EIE developed and launched the innovative “Safe WiFi Campaign” in 2014 which ignited a major shift in corporate responsibility to filter pornography and child sex abuse images (CSAM) from public WiFi (McDonald’s and Starbucks, as of 2019, filter WiFi in their company-owned locations, nationwide).

America’s first amendment does not protect the free flow of pornography into the lives and minds of children.(See Enough Is Enough White Paper on Obscenity. ) Most Americans are not aware that the United States Supreme Court has identified four categories of pornography that can be determined illegal. They include indecency, material harmful to minors, obscenity and child pornography. (Click here for more information about these categories.) Both obscenity and child pornography (more recently referred to as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM) are illegal for adults as well as children, yet are in abundance on the internet. Indecency and material harmful to minors are illegal when distributed to minor children in print and broadcast, but no such laws currently exist with regards to the internet. The bottom line is that children and adults have free and easy access to all categories of pornography online!

Enough Is Enough has a unique relationship with internet industry leaders encouraging them to adopt sound policies and promoting the use of “safer by design” technologies. EIE’s Flip the Switch™ campaign addresses the need for corporate accountability— demanding safety by design, safety by default, and real age-verification measures by the platforms and device manufacturers who market their products for consumption by children and teens.

EIE educates, empowers, equips and engages millions of parents and caring adults to play an active and hands-on role in protecting children from dangers on the internet. Let’s work together to push for the social change inspired by William Wilberforce and make the world a better place by making the internet safer for children and families.