Children, Porn and Science

If we’re going to investigate the impact of viewing porn, we need to consider where it usually starts–childhood.

Colin Erasmus, Microsoft SA’s security manager, said the average age at which a child is first exposed to Internet porn is 11. This typically happens by accident while a child is searching for information for school projects, or by receiving spam email.

Erasmus said 80 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds have experienced multiple hardcore exposures…

Some in our opposition give the impression that only hard scientific data generated from controlled experiments will convince them of the harm of porn. As the website ProtectKids.com observes (PDF), ethics boards are extremely unlikely to approve studies involving porn and children:

Although no evidence will ever sway some porn advocates to concede its potential for harm in the lives of adults, one might expect less dispute in the case of children. After all, children usually have less maturity and discernment. How can children deal wisely with hard-core sexuality that is (usually and hopefully) beyond their experience of life? If a neighbor exposed your child to hard-core pornography, wouldn’’t you regard that as sexual abuse?

Unfortunately, even the protection of children from pornography is now challenged in some circles because, the argument runs, the harm to children has never been ““proved”.” This is a recurring topic, for example, in the Internet discussion groups of the self-styled “”intellectual
freedom”” arm of the American Library Association (ALA). Similarly, in 1999, two North American court decisions were based in part on the idea that pornography’’s harm to children has
not been ““proved”.”[55]

By the same logic, one might argue that the harm of crack cocaine to children is also unproven, since in neither case is experimental research conducted on children. In both cases the omission is a simple matter of ethics–what kind of researcher exposes a child to putatively harmful matter, to see if harm does, in fact, result?

The Ethical Principles of the American Psychological Association (APA) state that “the fundamental requirements are the participants have made a fully informed and competent decision to participate and that they emerge from their research experiment unharmed–—or, at least, that the risks are minimal, understood by the participants, and accepted as reasonable”
[emphasis added].[56] Clearly, no child can give such informed consent, which is why no ethical researcher would conduct experimental studies on pornography and children. In short, studies including children do not exist because they would violate professional and ethical guidelines.

The insistence of some on impossible requirements will not stop us from demonstrating, with all the evidence available, that porn consumption entails a significant risk of harm. These accounts from sex offenders, for example, note that their average age of first viewing porn was 12.

ProtectKids.com makes one more point (PDF) about the appropriate standard of evidence to apply:

Can the harms of pornography be proved with the certainty of a proposition in geometry? No, because that is not the standard applied to research in the social sciences. The correct standard is to assess the preponderance of the evidence…

Pornography is not about real human sexuality: it’’s about a dehumanized, synthetic version of sex that eliminates love, honor, dignity, true intimacy and commitment. The image of sexuality offered by pornography comes without relationships, responsibility or consequences—–a largely fraudulent picture. Porn movies never show a girlfriend getting pregnant at 16, or a young man getting AIDS–or a married man resisting the temptation of another woman.

Unfortunately, the research demonstrates that pornography’’s fraudulent messages are ingested, affecting attitudes and behavior. Countless studies show that the basic messages of pornography–that a woman’’s function is to satisfy a man sexually, that women have no value, no meaning, and their desires and needs are irrelevant–breed sexual callousness and acceptance
of the rape myth (i.e. that women secretly desire to be raped).