The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), previously known as Morality in Media and Operation Yorkville, is an American conservative anti-pornography organization. The group has also campaigned against sex trafficking, same-sex marriage, sex shops and sex toys, the decriminalization of sex work, comprehensive sex education, and various works of literature or visual arts the organization has deemed obscene, profane or indecent. Its current president is Marcel Van der Watt. The organization describes its goal as "exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation".
The group was started as a part of the religious right and was primarily Catholic. It began as an interfaith group of three New York clergymen concerned about pornography and "salacious" magazines. The group became involved in several landmark court battles regarding obscenity laws and freedom of speech in the United States. The group's influence later declined due to the decreasing interest in the anti-obscenity cause among prosecutors, politicians and religious leaders. After modernizing its message from morality to exploitation, the group changed its name. NCOSE have stated that pornography constitutes a public health crisis, but this is not supported by any global health agency, and the organization has been criticized for advancing medical claims that are false, misleading or unsupported.
History Operation Yorkville Operation Yorkville (OY) was founded by an interfaith group of three New York City clergymen in 1962. Father Morton A. Hill of St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church became the public face of the group. 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. 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". The group maintained that they were fighting obscenities and not advocating censorship. 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. Massachusetts.
Morality in Media Operation Yorkville was renamed to Morality in Media (MIM) in 1968. Hill, president of MIM until his death in 1985, was appointed to serve on the 18-member President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography by President Lyndon B. Johnson. A report was submitted in 1970 that said all "adult" obscenity laws should be repealed. Hill called the commission's report a "magna carta for the pornographers". After the four justices nominated by President Richard Nixon reshaped the Supreme Court, the Burger Court disregarded the commission's report and upheld obscenity laws in 1973, citing the dissenting reports by Hill, minister Winfrey Link and Charles Keating, the leader of the Citizens for Decent Literature. In 1973, a member of the group complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about George Carlin's anti-censorship routine "Seven Dirty Words", leading to the 1978 decision FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. In 1980, the organization launched an unsuccessful lawsuit over the New York premiere of the film Caligula. The group also condemned the Monty Python film Life of Brian as a "direct, aggressive, deliberate violation of the rights of believing persons". In 1983, MIM asked for federal action against pornography in a White House meeting with President Ronald Reagan.
In the 1990s, the organization attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for funding what it deemed as obscene and profane art. The group also pressured adult stores by picketing them, contacting landlords and prosecutors and by lobbying for changes in zoning laws. In 1992, the group called for a boycott of all Time Warner products due to the publication of Madonna's book Sex. 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. The organization was an active supporter of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, although the group stated that many of its proposals were not implemented. After the Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, MIM began advocating for internet filters. Primarily Catholic, 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. MIM has argued that safer-sex information is indecent.
Once affiliated with the Christian Coalition, MIM would state that it "strongly upholds traditional family values and Judeo-Christian precepts". 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. After the 2009 Binghamton shootings happened on the same day as Iowa's Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, the organization released a statement titled "Connecting the Dots: The Line Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders". The group's president Bob Peters said that the sexual revolution and the "decline of morality" were the underlying cause of mass murders. In 2010, MIM hoped that government officials would take action against adult stores and sex toys, which Peters likened to "a cancer, a slow-moving cancer". The organization's influence had declined due to the decreasing interest in the anti-obscenity cause among prosecutors, politicians and religious leaders. Peters conceded that "the war is over and we have lost".
National Center on Sexual Exploitation The group's CEO and president at the time of the name change was Patrick A. Trueman, an attorney and a registered lobbyist. He served as Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, a United States Department of Justice Criminal Division, when the George H. W. Bush administration aggressively prosecuted obscenity cases against adult pornography. The organization underwent its most significant change in 2015 when it rebranded into the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) in order to expand its focus to the social science and data on the intersectionality of sexual exploitation. Publishing in Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Ronald Weitzer writes that the name change reflects the group's modernization of their image "from morality to exploitation", at the same time where the group introduced medicalizing language that "secularized" their arguments. NCOSE's flagship campaign is their Dirty Dozen List, an annual list of "mainstream facilitators of sexual exploitation". In 2015, the organization successfully pressured Walmart to remove Cosmopolitan from its checkout aisles. In 2016, NCOSE criticized Amnesty International after the human rights group joined Human Rights Watch and the World Health Organization in supporting the decriminalization of sex work. NCOSE said the policy was irresponsible and that decriminalization would encourage human trafficking. The group has also opposed legalized prostitution in Nevada. In 2017, the organization was one of the principal supporters of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA).
Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason has criticized the group for promoting claims about sexuality and pornography that she claims contradict the findings of peer-reviewed studies. Brown has also noted of the group: "The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups' activism. 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." 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". Since the 2010s, the group has stated that pornography constitutes a public health crisis. NCOSE drafted much of the language when Utah passed a resolution labeling pornography a "public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms". The resolution called for action against "the pornography epidemic that is harming the citizens of Utah and the nation". The claims are not backed by global health agencies, and outside experts criticized the language for its assertions. 15 other states replicated the resolution using mostly identical language.
On December 19 2023, Dawn Hawkins, CEO of NCOSE released a statement apologising for past harm done to the LGBTQ community
NCOSE has roots in and ties with extreme-right and anti-gay organizations.
On September 2, 2025, Ron DeHaas, chairman of NCOSE's board of directors, resigned after his 38-year-old stepson was charged with felony child sexual abuse and using computers to commit a crime. DeHaas covered some of his stepson’s $300,000 bond and facilitated his release from jail. DeHaas is the founder of Covenant Eyes which sells accountability applications for monitoring online access to sexual content.
NCOSE has also been accused of making pseudoscientific claims. According to Alexander Monea, "NCOSE is also particularly interesting for our case because it demonstrates a blend of alt-right arguments, woke Leftist arguments, pseudoscientific takes on scientific research, and traditional evangelical conservative positions on gender and sexuality. NCOSE thus perfectly demonstrates how crusades against pornography make for unlikely bedfellows."
Campaigns The organization operations can be categorized into three primary areas: grassroots corporate and legislative advocacy, legal advocacy through its law center, and public awareness and education.
Grassroots Corporate and Legislative Advocacy
EARN IT Act 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."
EBSCO controversy 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."Jackie Zubrzycki, Do Online Databases Filter Out Enough Inappropriate Material? , Education Week (July 14, 2017). The group said that some articles from Men's Health and other publications indexed by EBSCO included articles with sexual (but not pornographic) content, and that other articles in the database linked to websites that included pornography. 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."