Cordelia Anderson
Cordelia Anderson works to prevent harm and promote healthy development. She's counseled sex offenders, survivors, prostituted women and families of missing and murdered children. At the Hennepin County Attorney's Office beginning in the late 1970s, she worked as a child advocate and developed one of the first Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Programs. In 1992, she founded Sensibilities Prevention Consultation, based in Minneapolis. Anderson has conducted over 2,500 presentations nationally and internationally on topics including prevention of child sexual abuse/exploitation, impact of pornography, normalization of sexual harm, promotion of sexual health, bullying/cyber-bullying, restorative justice, and compassion fatigue.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Cordelia Anderson
Porn and Public Health
By Cordelia Anderson with Naomi Biesheuvel
October 1, 2015
The very idea of human trafficking can raise our hackles, yet we may be lulled into overlooking an even more fundamental public health and social justice issue.
Why do we see so many young boys committing acts of sexual abuse and sexual harm and filming them? And expecting girls to take pictures of themselves to send them? Adult men taking their sons to prostitutes as a transition into manhood or show them porn so that they know they're fit, hyper-masculine men — and actually wondering what's wrong with them if they're not using this material Cordelia Anderson: I promote sexual health and I know a lot of people who work in that fi eld are also defenders of pornography as harmless, "just sex When we treat women and children as sexual objects and commodities to use, abuse and then toss away — not even recycle, just use up and toss away — and get to the next because they're all interchangeable and it doesn't matter, that creates a problem not only for the people that are directly depicted but for everyone else The reason I mention children is, even though we recognize that child sexual abuse images are not protected free speech (that that is documentation of sexual abuse and thereby victimization), the reality is that the number one — or number two depending on the research you look at — type of pornography searched for worldwide is "youth C: Convivium publishes from the perspective of faith in common life, and I think a lot of people in faith communities react to pornography mostly out of guilt or shame, and go, "Oh yeah, that's bad CA: I frankly believe that exposing our children to pornography is a type of sexual abuse It's also the whole mainstream depiction that really hyper-sexualizes young people and makes it look as if it's okay and expected for adult men to be looking at them as if they are sexual objects, okay to view in that way and use in that way