Victor Cline - Career

Career

Victor Cline is involved with multiple family-oriented organizations, such as Marriage and Family Enrichment (which he co-founded) and The Lighted Candle Society. Cline's research area is on sex addiction, especially topics pertaining to pornography. Cline is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist specializing in marital and family counseling and the treatment of sexual compulsions and addictions. He also works with the victims of sexual abuse and sexual assault. Cline is also a behavioral scientist with publications in the area of “media and pornography effects.” As a practitioner, he has involved in the treatment of sexual addicts or compulsives including many pedophiles and their victims.

Due to his studies on the effects of pornography, Cline has been utilized as an expert witness in court cases and by the US Judiciary Committee. Cline's opinion was requested by the Commission on Child Online Protection, which is associated with San Jose State University. Cline provided the following testimony:

"I find that the use of child pornography in time desensitizes the viewer to its pathology no matter how aberrant or disturbing. It becomes acceptable and preferred. The man always escalates to more deviant material, and the acting out continues and escalates despite very painful consequences such as destruction of the family, loss of spouse, children, job, health, or incarceration after committing criminal acts."

According to Cline, pornography can plunge a person into the pornography cycle of addiction, escalation, desensitization and acting out sexually. The cost of addiction includes "divorce, loss of family and problems with the law," and it escalates so that the addict requires more deviancy in order to get a "high" or "sexual turn-on."