The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), previously known as Morality in Media and Operation Yorkville, is an American conservative anti-pornography organization.
[7] The group connected exposure to different types of "salacious" magazines and pornography to atheism, obscenity, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, masturbation, murder, sexually transmitted diseases and "high school sex clubs", but did not provide evidence for its claims.
[8] Although the group's actions emphasized the protection of minors, First Amendment Law Review wrote that "at times the organization seemed to be using children as a pretext for a society-wide ban".
[10] In 1963, the organization began a long-running effort to ban John Cleland's erotic novel Fanny Hill, which ended with the 1966 Supreme Court decision Memoirs v.
[17] The group also condemned the Monty Python film Life of Brian as a "direct, aggressive, deliberate violation of the rights of believing persons".
[21] In the mid-1990s, MIM was part of a religious boycott campaign against The Walt Disney Company after they began offering spousal benefits to same-sex partners of employees.
[24] After the Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, MIM began advocating for internet filters.
[24] Primarily Catholic,[25] the organization joined other groups in the religious right to criticize the Waxman report, which found that abstinence-only sex education programs were unscientific and contained false information.
[28] The organization was part of the Coalition for Marriage, a religious right collective that sought a ban on the partner recognition of gay couples and opposed the anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT people.
But it's been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.
"[52] Anti-Trafficking Review made assertions against NCOSE by claiming they "use misleading 'research reports' to fabricate a false medical consensus about the harms of pornography".
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation was one of over 70 groups that came out in support of the controversial EARN IT Act in 2020 and called it "the best piece of accountability in the tech space since the passage of FOSTA-SESTA in 2018, which makes it illegal for interactive computer services to knowingly facilitate sex trafficking.
"[54] In 2017, NCOSE placed EBSCO on its Dirty Dozen List because its databases, widely used in schools in the United States, "could be used to search for information about sexual terms.
[55] EBSCO responded by saying that it took the complaint seriously, but was unaware of any case "of students using its databases to access pornography or other explicit materials" and that "the searches NCOSE was concerned about had been conducted by adults actively searching for graphic materials, often on home computers that don't have the kinds of controls and filters common on school computers.
"[55] James LaRue, the director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, said that students have a right to receive information, even about topics that some groups deem inappropriate.
[57] On April 13, 2021, an article in Vice alleged that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation's rhetoric risked spilling over into real-world violence.
The organization responded by alleging that institutionalized racism in pornography "fuel[ed] the demand for radicalized sexual violence.
"[58] In the early months of 2020, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation led a group of NGOs from around a dozen countries internationally in a grassroots public advocacy effort in hopes of pressuring payment processing companies to recognize the allegations of abuse and criminality being levied by groups like NCOSE against pornography websites and cut ties with them.
[66][67] MindGeek, an international corporation that owns and operates sites like Pornhub, found itself the target of a class action lawsuit brought by NCOSE and several other law firms in February 2021.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Plaintiff Jane Doe, alleges that the company benefited from a sex trafficking venture and distributing child pornography (a.k.a.
[78] U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) grants of $150,000 in the 2005 and 2006 federal budgets funded Morality in Media's review of citizen-generated obscenity complaints submitted to the group's ObscenityCrimes.org website.