vitalvoices 2024-2025

Porn and Sexual Violence: Is there a link?

Thursday, February 13^th from 5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Speakers: Dr. Ethan Marshall of UHD, and Dr. Holly Miller of SHSU. 

Video Recording of this Presentation

Over the past several decades, researchers and public officials have grappled with understanding whether or not pornography is associated with sexual violence. While some public officials claim that pornography use represents a public health crisis, some researchers and clinical professionals dismiss this idea, claiming that there is no link between pornography and sexual violence. The purpose of this talk is to provide an unbiased understanding of what we know regarding the link between pornography and sexual violence, through a comprehensive overview of empirical evidence and real-life case studies of individuals who have committed sexually violent acts.

 

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200,000 African Americans 

The Great Migration to Houston

Thursday, February 20^th from 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Speaker: Dr. Bernadette Pruitt 

Register For This Event Today!

- C100 and via zoom

Come join us to learn more about the early history of African American life in Houston. Between 1900 and 1950, an estimated 50,000 African Americans relocated to Houston to escape rural poverty and social depravity. While they moved to a larger city that practiced racial segregation, racialized violence, wage differentials, and oppression based on race, the city still offered Black Texans and Louisianans more individualized and group freedoms. The city’s economy, largely thanks to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and historic discovery at the Spindletop Oilfield in 1900 and 1901, respectively, provided unprecedent prospects and enjoyments for African Americans compared to most African Americans and African-descent groups in the United States in the early twentieth century. Blacks, overall, earned more in wages and salaries when compared to others, built institutions that provided African-descent peoples with racial autonomy, and allowed activists the ability to fight back against structural racism. These facts ensured better schools, wealthier neighborhoods, successful civil-rights enterprises, and robust interest in the urban center as an alternative locale to the great western and “northern drive[s]” to popularized promised lands.  Of course, Houston disappointed many. Young people especially felt flustered and disillusioned by the ongoing fight for socioeconomic and sociopolitical equality. They certainly did not understand the constant threat of violence for the most mundane actions of humanity. They, for example, did not understand White anxiety about African American respectability, intelligence, wealth, confidence, and beauty. Instead of remaining in the South, by the 1930s, many decided to flee Houston permanently for greener pastures in California, Washington, or Chicago. Ironically, those that fled the urban South in the next few decades felt compelled to rethink their decision, and, in some instances, returned home.  Houston, Texas’s ability to attract African-descent peoples in the first half of the twentieth century only continued throughout the century and into the new millennium. While other cities—within and outside the South—have witnessed population decline in the last five decades, Black peoples nationwide and worldwide continue to uproot to Houston helping to make Houston the fourth largest city in the nation today.