Minneapolis city officials heard testimony about peoples’ encounters with porn, those
who consume porn and those who produce it at a hearing of the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on
December 13, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.165-168).
Testimony of Gary Kaplan
I am the Executive Director of Alpha Human Services, which is an inpatient treatment program for sex offenders. It’s the only community-based inpatient program specifically for sex offenders in the country…
I am also the Director of Outpatient Treatment Programming for Sex Offenders and a licensed psychologist… I have a number of years of experience with criminal sex offenders, probably about ten… [M]ost of my colleagues, I think, feel as I do: that clinically our impression is that there is a substantial role that pornography plays. Certainly with virtually all sexually-obsessed or preoccupied individuals that we see, whether committing sex crimes or not, pornography seems to be a pretty major role…
I always get the police reports and everything else when I am doing a court order. And over and over again I end up seeing they, with a search warrant, pulled out boxes of pornography. I am doing a court-ordered psychological evaluation for Scott County right now…and pornography played a role in that, showing pornographic materials to fifteen-year-old girls and getting them drugged in exchange for allowing them to engage in sexual conduct…
In this particular incident, they were videotapes. The psychological evaluation I just finished for Hennepin County, for Judge Schiefelbein, actually they were magazines, boxes of magazines and videotapes… The sex offender had been arrested in an adult bookstore for soliciting sex. He was anally penetrating his son, twelve-year-old son, with his penis and also a son, fifteen years old, from another marriage.
Another way that we see pornography being used in the commission of crimes is showing them to kids. I remember an interesting case in which an ice cream man, a Good Humor man, always kept an open magazine by him as he drove along, and the kids would look at it. And he would use that as some kind of manipulative technique to involve the people into talking about sex or getting interested in sex, as a comment: have you ever seen anything like this before, or have you ever done anything like this previously. So, you know, there is certainly a number of ways that pornographic materials are used. You know…in a lot of respects, the written pornographic materials are as troublesome as those that are graphic or pictorial…
[B]y the way, in our programs we don’t allow any pornographic materials whatsoever…
There are two schools of thought, that in fact deviant sexual fantasy is an outlet, or enforcer. For those of us, certainly my colleagues–I have been doing this for ten years–there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that masturbation to deviant sexual fantasy reinforces and increases the probability that that behavior will recur, as opposed to decreasing, as it would [if it] became an outlet.
See also:
Porn’s “Verbatim” Accounts of the Pleasures of Child Sexual Abuse Don’t Square with Reality
Testimony in Minneapolis: Pornographic Materials Often Found in Homes with Child Sexual Abuse
Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization