The Porn Controversy
“The pedestal has always been the pits, and women remember that when told that they need ‘protection’ from sexual words and images.”
– Sandy Rapp, musician and activist
Why defend “pornography”? After all, according to (Australian Senator) Brian Harradine: “the bulk of X-rated videos engender a ‘sexually calloused and manipulative orientation towards women’ and mediate ‘in the mind of the habitual viewer a perception of women in general as being highly promiscuous and available’ ” and thus are rightfully banned.
Notably, Harradine also seeks to ban safe-sex information, outlaw contraception and abortion, etc. Apart from the fact that Harradine’s litany is a decade old hoax promulgated by those who are apparently most desirous of repressing women, many women do not agree that censorship will protect them, whether or not they agree with his claims as to the content of videos rated X in Australia.
A variety of articles explaining why bannng “pornography” is dangerous to women are linked to below.
See also separate pages on research and studies into the effects of viewing pornography on behaviour, and how these are misrepresented by the pro-censorship lobby:
•Fallacies & Urban Myths
•Research & Studies: Pornography
•The X-Rated Hoax: A Tale of Harridans, Charlatans & Poppycock, a research paper containing a chronicle of the saga of how X-Rated/NVE videos became banned in all Australian States, by Irene Graham, 18 August 1999.
•A Candle in the Dark, A report on ‘evidence’ submitted to the Australian Senate NVE inquiry in March 2000, by Irene Graham, 31 March 2001.
——————————————————————————–
Censorship? Just say “No!”, Avedon Carol, Feminists Against Censorship, UK
“In a highly-politicised debate where one side gets to control the discourse by censoring the subject at hand, they can say anything they want. If people never really get to see pornography, they won’t know that it is less violent than other media, so the moral right can get away with claiming pornography is more violent. In this climate, it becomes difficult to point out that half a century of research and accumulated data conclusively proves that sexual openness and explicit media are not the problem. Question the moral right’s position and they call you a child abuser.”
Pornography’s legitimate place in society, Patricia Petersen – Associate Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology, The Courier Mail, 14 Aug 98
“It is not the business of the government (or the “sisterhood”) to prevent adult women doing what they please with their own bodies.”
Speech at Brisbane Anti-Censorship Rally, Patricia Petersen, Lecturer in Psychology specialising in sexual ethics, Central Queensland University, 28 May 99
“Making it more difficult for adults to access pornographic material is potentially hazardous for all women and children within this country. When pornography was made freely available in Denmark in the late 60’s, the incidence of sex crimes, sexual violence towards women and children, dropped markedly. In 1967 erotic material in Denmark was removed from the obscenity statute. This resulted in sex crimes in Denmark which had been stable from 1958 to 1966 decreasing by 25 percent in 1967, 13 percent in 1968 and 30.5 percent in 1969.”
NVE and Australian Community Standards: Whose community are we talking about?, Kath Albury, March 1999
“By making certain kinds of sex ‘unrepresentable’, the Australian government is dis-enfranchising a sexual minority who are not breaking any laws. If we don’t know more about the mating habits of the perves next door, it’s because they’re not stupid. They know that there aren’t many public figures who are willing to stand up for their rights to sexual expression. Maybe you don’t think they have any rights to that kind of sexuality. Maybe you’re right, maybe not.”
A Feminist Argument against Censorship, Avedon Carol, Feminists Against Censorship UK, 24 Feb 96
“Why have feminists historically opposed censorship – particularly of material with sexual content? Because no matter how we are assured that the censorship is meant to protect us, the targets of such censorship invariably turn out to include feminist ideas and ideals, information that benefits women and challenges sexism…”
Why Feminists Need Porn, Catharine Lumby, 1997
(Chapter 5, “Bad Girls: The media, sex & feminism in the 90’s”, Allen & Unwin).
“The controversy surrounding Elle Macpherson’s decision to pose nude in US Playboy illustrates this need to police the boundaries between artistic nudity and porn. Macpherson walked around starkers for much of the film Sirens and revealed vast expanses of her flesh in her Bali calendar but no one seemed to mind. It was her modest, playful Playboy shots which garnered public disapprobation. Playboy is porn, albeit soft core, the logic runs, and nice supermodels don’t appear in magazines inclined to put staples through their navels.”
Censorship Hurts Women, NCAC Background Paper
“To be sexually free, women must be able to discover and legitimate their own sexualities through representing and seeing them represented in a vast variety of ways. We don’t want the U.S. government, or Andrea Dworkin, telling us which representations are “good” and which ones “degrade” us. To be equal, women must take control of their bodies, aided by information about contraception, abortion, and AIDS that today, as in the past, is so often attacked. To be safe from sexual violence, we must be able to publicly describe it in every obscene detail.”
Excerpt from A Feminist Critique of “The” Feminist Critique of Pornography, Nadine Strossen, Virginia Law Review, August 1993
“Censorship is paternalistic, perpetuating demeaning stereotypes about women, including that sex is bad for us.”
A Feminist Overview of Pornography, Ending in a Defence Thereof, Wendy McElroy
“Pornography is free speech applied to the sexual realm. Freedom of speech is the ally of those who seek change: it is the enemy of those who seek to maintain control. Pornography, along with all other forms of sexual heresy, such as homosexuality, should have the same legal protection as political heresy. This protection is especially important to women, whose sexuality has been controlled by censorship through the centuries.”
Controlling female sexuality wrong, Elisabeth Carnell
“The continuing problem of rape is one of the biggest reasons to oppose the [Bertha Capen Reynolds Society’s] agenda. If the BCRS convinces people that it is pornography, not men, that causes rape, the issue of how responsible men are for rape becomes a real issue.”
Steinem goes too far when she rails against Flynt, pornography, Elisabeth Carnell, Opinion Columnist, Western Herald, Jan 97
“Those feminists who think pornography is simply depiction after depiction of women being raped need to spend more time in adult bookstores.”
Deja Vu ads under irrational attack, Elisabeth Carnell
“It’s not surprising most of the “feminists” advocating censorship of sexually suggestive speech usually draw on resources such as the Meese Pornography Commission’s report. It’s the height of irony that purportedly progressive advocates find themselves in bed with the most reactionary element of the Reagan administration. Of course two female members of the Meese Commission, Judith Becker and Ellen Levine, became its sharpest critics and strongly dissented from the commission’s conclusion that “pornography” contributed to violence.”
Porn free, Jennie Bristow, LM issue 115, Nov 98
“Free speech, they say, is of little use in healing emotional wounds. This is the new radical feminist argument for banning pornography, which literally comes from the heart and which, in these caring times, nobody can dispute. Now that, I do care about. It’s a low trick which makes hurt feelings the end of the world and depicts defending freedom of expression as the act of a callous, insensitive person who has never had to suffer the trauma of psychological debasement.”
Pornography and Feminism, Colleen McEneany, 1997/98
“Promoting censorship of pornography on the foundation that illegal sexual acts repulse you is hardly a sturdy platform to stand upon and does not justify the censoring of all pornography. Porn which depicts illegal acts is far fetching from legal porn or porn consisting of consenting adults participating in sexual acts.”
The Modern Pornography Debates, Nettie Pollard, founding member of Feminists Against Censorship, 1993
“Anti-censorship feminists believe that censorship is just a means for the state to continue to control women…Conservative legislators can pretend to support programmes for women by increasing censorship of pornography while doing nothing of substance for women. Thus, child-care, jobs, economic equality, reproductive freedom and other feminist issues can be ignored while politicians feel they’ve “done their bit” for women. The result, however, is further stigmatisation and danger for women in the sex industry as well as other sexually active women.”
Whores and Mothers: Some Ideas on Women and Pornography, Mary Hayward, 1986
“Not only do the feminist lobby continue to mistake imaginary women for real ones and assume that men do the same, but they have adopted as their own both the Victorian conservatives’ idea of women as mentally fragile creatures who must not encounter an offensive picture and the Victorian radicals’ idea of women as permanent victims. They have developed a definition of womanhood every bit as oppressive as the one their predecessors fought to destroy.”
Banning Pornography Endangers Women, Wendy McElroy
“Since the mid-1980s, a strange sight has been on the political horizon. Feminists are standing alongside their arch enemies, conservatives and religious fundamentalists, to call for anti-pornography laws. This phenomenon threatens the well-being of women in at least three important ways: (1) feminism is no longer a stronghold of freedom of speech; (2) women’s unacceptable sexual choices are now under new attack; (3) it involves rejecting the principle ‘a woman’s body, a woman’s right’.”
Feminist Moralism, Pornography, and Censorship, Barbara Dority, Executive Director, Washington Coalition Against Censorship & Co-Chair, Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce.
“Sexism and violence toward women, and men, was a reality long before pornography as we know it today existed and long before there were facilities for the mass distribution of words and images. Sexist and violent materials are symptoms of a sexist and violent society — not the causes. Sexist and violent materials do not create violence, people do. If we really want to address violence…”
What is Pornography? My Career and How I’ve been Censored, Tuppy Owens, 1992
“I can take most sexual censorship. It encourages me to be more creative and search for words such as “dingleberries”. If people really want porno, they will find it. But what really upsets me is when censorship destroys people’s lives. …I was disgusted with the British Health Education Council who refused to let me print one of their HIV information ads in my SAFER SEX MANIAC’S BIBLE (which I was prepared to do free of charge) — “We don’t advertise in sex books” they told me. Where, I ask, would be more appropriate?”
Writing Sado-masochistic Pornography: A Woman’s Defence, Deborah Ryder, 1990
“I am a writer: my sexual preference is masochism. I write books about sado-masochism because I enjoy doing it and writing about it, and because my readers enjoy reading about it. I am liberated because I do my own thing, though it paradoxically involves being the opposite of liberated for the duration of the session. Everyone needs a retreat into fantasy; this safety-valve makes him/her more competent in the real world and drastically reduces the chances that he (or she) would seek to translate the fantasy into reality.”
Aesthetics and Striptease, Patricia Petersen, 1998
“The point of this paper is to discuss whether the unruly sexual nature of female striptease can warrant artistic applaud, or instead, must always demand aesthetic condemnation. I shall argue that the if the female nude, as she is displayed in striptease, is positioned and understood within an aesthetic-historical context, then there may be grounds for viewing her as legitimate. Not only this, but if she is recognised as having the potential to push and expand sexual boundaries, then there may be grounds for considering her a heroine of feminist sexual interest.”
The X-Rated Hoax: A tale of harridans, charlatans & poppycock (Cont’d)
“…correlation does not in itself imply causality or even a basis for the prediction of future behaviour…there will also be correlations with many other factors, such as average weekly earnings, school retention rates or even adherence to fundamentalist religion or vegetarianism – all things which have risen in recent years.”
– Senator Olive Zakharov, 28 April 1988
The Effects of Pornography
Discussion of evidence by the five members of the Joint Select Committee on Video Materials who called for a complete ban on NVE (non-violent erotica) videos is contained in Volume 1 Chapter 13, titled “‘Likely Effects’ of Video Material”. Comments during Senate debates suggest Senator Brian Harradine largely drafted this section of the report.
Discussion by the five members who found the evidence unconvincing is contained in Volume 2 Chapter 14, titled “Harm and Video Material”. Dr Dick Klugman, the Committee Chair, drafted this section.
Hereinafter, the “Harradine report” refers to the report of Committee members who opposed majority Recommendation 1 that an NVE category be implemented, but nevertheless signed the majority report (Volume 1). The “Klugman report” refers to the report of Committee members who supported Recommendation 1 and signed the major dissenting report (Volume 2).
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Defining and Categorising “Pornography”
The report defines the term “pornography” as:
“video material which is predominantly sexually explicit and intended primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal” (Vol. 1, Ch. 13). This definition was chosen and adopted by Senator Harradine from the 1986 Meese Commission (USA Attorney-General’s Commission on Pornography). (It should be noted that the findings of the Meese Commission have generally been discredited due to its leading terms of reference and its conservative membership. For further information see Wilson & Nugent, 1986 and Califa, 1986).
The authors of the Harradine report sub-categorised “pornography” as follows:
Category 1 video pornography or violent pornography.
“13.44 The dominant theme of this material is that it ‘objectifies’ women. …Women, this pornography suggests, are things to be used to satisfy male sexual urges. The ‘objectification’ or ‘commodification’ of women, which occurs in Category I or violent pornography, sanctions threatening, beating, raping, and even torturing, maiming, and killing women…”
Category II video pornography or non-violent degrading pornography.
“13.46 The dominant theme of this material also is that it ‘objectifies’ and ‘commodifies’ women. Rather than treating women as free and responsible initiators of human activity, the material in this category, although non-violent, treats women as sexual commodities to arouse the sexual desires of its target audience. Thus sexual intercourse is typically depicted as a mechanical act devoid of love or human consequences, fellatio, cunnilingus are explicitly and voyeuristically portrayed, as is masturbation, ejaculation, penetration of the female anus and diverse other acts or fetishes. It contains explicit depictions of female masturbation and male homosexual acts including anal penetration. …
13.48 The Committee, as did the Meese Commission, also refers to this material as degrading in that it frequently ‘depicts people, usually women, as existing solely for the sexual satisfaction of others, usually men, or that depicts people, usually women, in decidedly subordinate roles in their sexual relations with others, or that depicts people engaged in sexual practices that would to most people be considered humiliating.’ (Meese, p.331).
13.49 …Women are frequently depicted as eager for sexual experience of any kind and ever ready for any opportunity for sexual activity. This is frequently manifested in the group sex scenes depicting diverse sexual activity, which are a feature of much of this material in this category.”
Category III video pornography.
“13.50 …a very small category which depicts two adults participating as fully consenting equal partners in reciprocal sexual activity of a heterosexual nature in a one to one relationship. …this material…contains little plot or character development. … its exploitative intent is to arouse the sexual desires of its viewers. …A signficant factor in policy considerations…is the fact that sexual intercourse, which in all cultures is essentially regarded as the domain of personal sexual privacy, is voyeuristically portrayed as though public property.”
Having embedded their own personal opinions and perceptions of the material within the definitions, the authors of the Harradine report then selectively quoted behavioural science research in an endeavour to justify a ban on all categories of “pornography”.
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
The Committee’s Intent: Prophecy
The introduction to the discussion of behavioural science research in the Harradine report states:
“It is not the intention of the Committee to adopt a narrow criminological perspective which requires evidence to demonstrate that exposure to video material produces a ‘measurable’ harm to society based on a causative link between videos and particular criminal offences.” (Vol. 1, Ch. 13.6) According to the Harradine report, criminologists, the media and others were “demanding an unreasonable standard of proof” that viewing videos causes the commission of crimes. The Committee members, however, maintained that “it would be almost impossible to prove a direct and sole causal link” because of “other influential variables”. They asserted that if behavioural science theories, supported by clinical and correlational studies, establish “reliable predictions” of human behaviour “it would be unenlightened for Parliament to ignore them”.
Whether “reliable predictions”, that someone somewhere may commit a crime after viewing a video, are sufficient justification for criminalising distribution of information is a matter of debate. The debate, however, is substantially influenced by beliefs that the predictions about human behaviour are in fact reliable and that the kind of harm predicted warrants criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for dissemination and/or possession of information predicted to cause such harm. Such beliefs often originate from a combination of lies, misleading information, misuse of statistics and misunderstandings about the type of studies quoted. It is thus not surprising that well-informed people demand proof of actual harm from those seeking to control, especially by criminal law, what other people may view in the privacy of their own home.
The research referred to in the Harradine report in support of banning non-violent erotica does not reliably predict human behaviour, let alone show a causal link between viewing X-rated material and commission of violent or criminal acts. More significantly, however, the report makes clear that the kind of “harm” members wished to prevent has little, if anything, to do with violence or crime. Rather, they desire to ban the dissemination of ideas of which they personally disapprove, in an attempt to control other people’s thoughts and non-violent, consenting, private behaviour.
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Muddled Psychology, or Pseudo-psychology
Discussing the report in the Senate, Senator Olive Zakharov emphasised that she was a member of the Australian Psychological Society and a practising counselling psychologist, and pointed out that the Harradine report’s discussion of behavioural learning theory in Chapter 13 “is very simplistic and selective” and “seems to have been written without reference to anything more than selected submissions and perhaps an encyclopaedia”. She observed that the chapter:
“…goes into great detail about variations within social learning theory, yet even the theory itself does not seem to have been adequately understood, while ignoring a range of other equally well accepted theories of learning which are less simplistic…
The muddled psychology, or pseudo-psychology, in this chapter is not really capable of sensible debate, but I do not want to draw attention to some underlying assumptions about methodology which are probably responsible for the morass of theory and claims about likely effects of viewing which we find in this chapter. There is a basic lack of logic involved here or a misunderstanding of the precise meaning of some terms used in common speech and also used with more precision in the fields of science and statistics. These terms are ’cause’ and ‘correlation’.
The third word which is not used in this chapter, but which should be, is ‘antecedent’, literally meaning something going before, a prior event or a pre-existing condition. Thus, an antecedent may be a cause, but certainly not necessarily so. Attending school is an antecedent for most adult criminality, but I doubt anyone would say that school attendance causes crime or that the drinking of milk causes alcoholism, although clearly it is an antecedent.
Yet we find in the majority report statements that seem to assume that, if one action is followed in time by another, it is likely, or even highly probable, that the first causes the second. Thus, viewing violent videos is seen as causing the violence, whereas the causes probably lie in any one or more of a number of factors. Viewing violent videos may be an antecedent, for example, to juvenile violence, but the cause may well be something like parental attitudes to violence or viewing actual violence at home or elsewhere where it is seen as the only way to solve conflict. …
Similarly, correlation does not in itself imply causality or even a basis for the prediction of future behaviour, as seems to be claimed in chapter 13 of the majority report. When a correlation is found or even sometimes, as in this case, claimed to be found between the hire and sale of videos and crime rates…there will also be correlations with many other factors, such as average weekly earnings, school retention rates or even adherence to fundamentalist religion or vegetarianism – all things which have risen in recent years.” (Senate Hansard, 28 Apr 1988, p.2109).
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Scientists and Moral Authoritarians
The Harradine report commences discussion of “behavioural science evidence” by asserting that the Film Censorship Board (FCB) “relied on a limited range of research in its document attached to the Attorney-General’s press release of 26 October 1984”, then dismisses that research:
“Having declared that:
‘Unless it can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a substantial majority of the population, that the “pornographer’s” view of sexuality, as depicted in filmic images produces tangible social harm, such views should be allowed to take their place in the market place – besides other views depicting different life-styles, attitudes and values.’ The FCB [Film Censorship Board] paper asserted that:
‘Whereas recent research by such eminent social scientists as Ed Donnerstein, Neil Malamuth and Dan Linz (of the U.S.A.) has fairly conclusively pointed to the socially deleterious effects (even amongst clinically “normal” persons) of being exposed to “substantial amounts” of “aggressive pornography”, there appears to be no unequivocal and uncontested research currently available which draws the same conclusions in relation to exposure to “traditional” hard core pornography of the non-sexually violent kind.’ Since that time further behavioural science research has been published.” (Vol 1, Ch. 13, p.204)
This “new” research apparently consisted largely of further analysis of pre-existing research by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, which is discussed in eight of the subsequent sixteen pages on “likely effects of pornography” in the Harradine report.
Senator Harradine, and others who campaign against the availability of non-violent erotica, primarily refer to the work of Zillmann and Bryant and those who have worked with them, although they rarely mention their names:
“It is interesting to note that at least four of the researchers saw the non-violent pornographic videos as being more harmful…than even the more violent video material. I refer to Professor Check, Professor Zillmann, Professor Bryant and Professor Weaver” (Senate Hansard, 28 Sep 1988, p.935). These researchers’ findings continue to be cited a decade and more after they conducted their research, despite other researchers at the time, and since, having been unable to confirm the findings. Some have found that exposure to non-violent sexually explicit material does not cause aggression, violence or crime and, in some instances, that it may have socially beneficial effects. Dr Edward Donnerstein, for example, was adamant that sexually explicit non-violent materials had no anti-social effects.
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
“Sexual Callousness” et al
(Note: If you are visiting this page after reading remarks about this document and its author by Senator Brian Harradine during a Senate Committee public hearing on 30 March 2000, please see the author’s response.) Zillmann, a right-wing moralist anti-pornography researcher, had been trying to prove that pornography causes rape and other “anti-social” behaviour since the early 1970s (Carol, 199-).
Zillmann, and Bryant who often worked with him, are the researchers most frequently cited by pro-censorship campaigners (e.g. the Australian Family Association) as having proved that pornography makes men “sexually callous” towards women. For example, Senator Harradine is frequently heard insisting that X-rated non-violent materials:
“engender a ‘sexually calloused and manipulative orientation towards women'” (Harradine, 1998). At face value, the contention suggests that viewing non-violent sexually explicit material has been proven to cause men to become sexually aggressive or violent towards women. However, this is not so at all. The term “calloused” originated from Zillmann and, as Avedon Carol notes, when Zillmann spoke of “callousness towards women” he meant:
“a greater tolerance for homosexuality; a belief that women should be able to choose other priorities beside motherhood; less belief in marriage; a belief that women may enjoy sex and choose to participate in it for reasons other than pleasing their husbands or conceiving children – in short, the goals of most feminist groups of the time. Zillmann was unable to demonstrate any increase in misogynist or violent attitudes and desires, although he did try.” (Carol, 199-)
The Harradine report states, for example, that Zillmann and Bryant (1984)
“tested the predictions…that increased exposure to ‘erotic’ [non-violent] material would lead to the adoption of what might be termed the ‘sexual lifestyles’ portrayed in pornography”. The report further states that Zillmann and Bryant found that the materials used in their experiment caused both males and females to trivialise rape, increased male callousness (see previous para) towards women, and, in general to form beliefs “that are not conducive to respect for the opposite (or same sex)”.
Zillmann and Bryant speculated that because the materials used “did not entail depictions of sexual access through coercion” that it must have been the portrayal of women as “hyperpromiscuous” and “hysterically euphoric in response to just about any sexual or pseudo-sexual stimulation” which led to attitudes sympathetic to sexual aggression, i.e. trivialisation of rape by both women and men.
However, these findings are of dubious merit. Senator Helen Coonan notes some concerns regarding the reliability of Zillmann and Bryant’s 1982 study in her paper “Censorship Revisited”:
“The original findings were formulated from the surveyed responses of eighty male and eighty female undergraduate university students who had been exposed to varying degrees of non violent sexually explicit videos for a period of six weeks. The greatest exposure endured by respondents over the test period was four hours and 48 minutes. In one scenario, the students were asked to act as jurors and recommend a prison sentence for the offender in a specific rape case from which conclusions were drawn regarding attitudes to rape and sexual callousness toward women.
Before the conclusions are generalised assuming universal application, some aspects of the research warrant scrutiny. The following issues are unclear from the published data:
•to what extent ‘controlled experimental conditions’ were maintained and whether the exclusion of a benchmark viewing time of porn for undergraduate university students detracted from the methodology;
•whether the length of a recommended prison term in a specific rape case was indicative of disapproval and condemnation of rape or merely cognisant of the circumstances in that particular case;
•whether conclusions about sexual callousness and the trivialisation of rape can be satisfactorily drawn from the frequency of students recommending relatively lenient sentences involving short terms of incarceration; and
•whether the failure to find a significant gender bias in the alleged connection between pornography and rape with both men and women tested recommending shorter prison sentences detracts from its overall value.” (Coonan, 1997).
The Harradine report also refers to a later experiment in which
“Zillmann and Bryant set out to confirm the findings already made and to determine what, if any, further effects long-term exposure to pornography has on social and sexual mores” focusing on three areas:
“(a) perceptions and attitudes concerning sexually intimate relationships, especially marriage and the family as essential societal institutions,
(b) personal happiness and sexual satisfaction, and
(c) possible shifts in erotic appetite. (cited in [Zillmann, 1986])”
According to the report, “Zillmann and Bryant found that prolonged consumption of pornography – one hour per week for six consecutive weeks…had a powerful adverse effect on evaluations of the desirability and viability of marriage. Among the subjects of the experiment, endorsements of marriage dropped from 60 per cent in the control group to 38 per cent in the treatment groups. The effect was comparable whether the subjects were males or females, students or non-students”.
Zillmann and Bryant also claimed to have found reduction in both males and females’ desire to have children, and alleged that “consumers eventually compare appearance and performance of pornographic models with that of their intimate partners” and that “dissatisfaction with intimate partners and perhaps with sex at large seems the inevitable result”.
The personal opinions of anti-porn researchers are evident in such claims of “inevitability”. The Klugman report quotes the comments of McKay and Dolff that what has been
“neglected in work on pornography is that adults capable of functioning in contemporary society are also quite able to distinguish the difference between reality and fantasy. That such a point requires stating is indicative of the overly simplistic model of human behaviour which is reflected in this type of work.” (McKay & Dolf, 1984) Unsurprisingly, the Harradine report favourably quotes Zillmann and Bryant’s findings without mention of any of the methodological problems. Carol points out that others have been less enthusiastic about Zillmann and Bryant’s research:
“Having noted the varied interpretability of Zillmann and Bryant’s findings, the [USA] Surgeon-General’s report said that the only reliable findings of the research that supposedly proved men were more callous towards women after looking at pornography was this: the group that saw pornography estimated more accurately the prevalence of sexual practices in society. The control group, which did not see the material, tended to underestimate grossly how common certain sexual acts were”. and comments:
“But even this result may be less reliable than it appears, due to methodological problems. Zillmann and Bryant had tried to include non-students in their research, but many of them left the study group when they discovered they would be asked to look at pornography. This meant that the control group contained a different population – older, perhaps more settled married men, for example – and thus any differences in the answers the groups gave to the questions might only reflect different attitudes among the different groups, and not pornography effects at all. The study was no longer controlled. In the end, the research may only mean that older, married men are less critical of their partners than young, single psychology students, and that such young, educated men have more liberal attitudes about women’s roles and homosexuality, and more realistic knowledge of sexual practices in society.” (Carol, 1994, p.69)
Contrary to Zillmann and Bryant’s findings, “in 1987, researchers Edward Donnerstein, Daniel Linz and Stephen Penrod reported in The Question of Pornography that subjects shown non-violent pornography
‘exhibited no significant increases in the tendency to (1) hold calloused attitudes about rape, (2) view women as sexual objects, (3) judge the victim of a reenacted rape trial as more responsible for her own assault, or (4) view the defendant as less responsible for the victim’s assault.'” (Carol, 1994, p.63)
Careful consideration of researchers’ personal prejudices and biases is warranted before considering their findings. What some researchers call callous, is often what many people call non-sexist.
“Daniel Linz and Neil Malamuth class this position as moral/authoritarian. In Communication Concepts 5: Pornography, they note that Zillmann and Bryant meant to test:
‘the moralist assumption that pornography fosters a lack of respect for, and belief in, traditional institutions such as marriage, traditional relationships betweeen the sexes, and traditional roles for women. They hypothesize that the use of pornographic material may lead to general acceptance of sex crimes, alter perceptions of evaluations of marriage, spawn distrust among intimate partners, inspire claims for sexual freedom, and even diminish the desire to have children. In effect, these researchers have turned their attention to the moralist contention that pornography is causally related to the general decline of basic values in American society.'” (Carol, 1994, p.64)
The X-Rated Hoax: A tale of harridans, charlatans & poppycock (Cont’d)
“Women are more in danger from the repression of sexually explicit materials than from their free expression.”
– Leonore Tiefer, Psychologist and Sex Therapist
Good Girls & Bad Girls
The Harradine report also quotes research by Dr James B. Weaver (then Assistant Professor, College of Communications, University of Kentucky), who had also worked with Zillmann at times.
The report states that Weaver had
“identified research which link cognitive categorisation of women, based on observed or inferred promiscuity, with a sexually calloused and manipulative orientation toward women. ([Weaver, 1987] p.33) According to this research the link occurs because, for many men, once a woman is categorised as promiscuous, she becomes ‘public property’ and is seen as having ‘forfeited her right to accept or reject sexual partners’. Specifically many men report substantially more justification for the use of exploitative techniques to obtain sexual intercourse as a function of the ‘type of girl’ involved (ibid. p. 33)”.
The research Weaver had identified is not specified by the report’s authors. However, they appear to have accepted as fact that the research was reliable in finding that “many men report substantially more justification for the use of exploitative techniques” with women they categorise as “bad-girls”. No information was provided on whether such men actually used such techniques or just reported they thought there was more justification, nor whether they used such techniques with “good-girls” while believing there is less justification.
The report says that on the basis of the research findings he had identified, Weaver tested his theory, inter alia, that repeated exposure to “the seemingly factual, documentary style depiction of female sexual pleasure and abandon presented by contemporary sexually explicit materials” would “result in the generalization and misattribution of characteristics associated with promiscuous women to other women, and in turn, expansion of the ‘bad-girl’ category.” (Vol 2, p.748).
Weaver’s experiment found that “exposure to non-violent sexually explicit materials can adversely influence perceptions of the ‘sexual receptivity’ of women without affecting other personality assessments” and that both the male and female student participants who had viewed film clips showing female-instigated sex recommended shorter periods of incarceration for a convicted rapist unconnected with the film clip they had been shown.
As with Zillmann and Bryant’s work, it is questionable whether conclusions about the trivialisation of rape can be satisfactorily drawn from the frequency of students (both female and male) recommending relatively lenient sentences involving short terms of incarceration.
According to the Harradine report:
“In the abstract to his paper, Weaver concludes that the ‘pattern of perceptual responses [obtained from his research] suggests that exposure to media portrayals of female sexual permissiveness can activate cognitions that reflect a general “loss of respect” for female sexual autonomy and self-determinism’.” (p.750)
The “loss of respect” referred to by Weaver does not appear to have been proven by his experiments, but assumed from the outset, that is, it is assumed that many men lose “respect” (which is not defined) for women after perceiving them to be sexually permissive (assuming such men had “respect” for women in general in the first place).
It should be noted that Weaver did not use pornography, but clips from American network television and general-release films. No X-rated films were used in the study let alone XXX materials (an X-rating is given in America to films with only minor sexual content deemed unsuitable for viewers under 18) (Carol, 1994, p.69).
Nevertheless, the Harradine report asserts:
“It is significant to note that Weaver’s research found that materials drawn from (American) R-rated films, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, did modify the attitudes of experimental subjects in socially undesireable [sic] ways. …If materials made up from (American) R-rated films can [lead men to perceive females to be more permissive], then it is not unreasonable to assume that [non violent erotica] can likewise affect male attitudes towards females in a sexually hostile manner”.
Apart from the matter of the actual contents of the American R-rated films of the time and in particular the clips used in the experiment, it is a remarkably large jump to conclude that perceptions of female permissiveness result in “sexually hostile” attitudes towards women. No evidence is provided in the report’s discussion of research that anyone other than the report’s authors and moral crusaders have “sexually hostile” attitudes towards women who enjoy sexual activity.
As in almost all discussion of the research in the Harradine report, the overwhelming impression given is that the report’s authors, and the researchers they quote favourably, hold sexist attitudes. They call for the banning of depictions of women enjoying sex, on the alleged grounds that this is necessary to “protect” women from “sexually hostile” attitudes. They imply that women ought to suppress expression of their sexuality because men can’t be expected to control themselves. In so doing they offer men excuses for sexual coercion and violence toward women: “porn made me do it”.
“Good-girl”/”bad-girl” categorisations of women have existed since time immemorial. The Harradine report provides no indication that censorship of sexually explicit material will change that. It does however strongly indicate that the objective of the report’s authors is not to protect women, but to suppress depictions of female sexuality of which they personally disapprove. Notably the authors do not call for banning of the type of material (R-rated) used by Weaver, but of material (X-rated) he did not use.
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
‘Debbie Does Dallas’ causes no harm
The Harradine report briefly mentions that Dr Edward Donnerstein (Professor of Communication, Center for Communications Research, University of Wisconsin) “was adamant that sexually explicit non-violent materials had no anti-social effects”. As such findings were not helpful to the authors’ objective of banning non-violent sexually explicit material, Donnerstein’s findings on this matter were barely acknowledged in their report.
The Klugman report, however, records that Donnerstein told the Committee that in his recent research using video material and viewing the films in their entirety:
…the sexually explicit X [American] rated material of a very popular nature – films such as ‘Debbie Does Dallas’, ‘The Other Side of Julie’, ‘Inside Jennifer Wells’ and other titles which I cannot remember at the present moment – which do not contain physical violence, did not produce any effects whatsoever. (Evidence, p.62)
…
It is those messages about violence, and messages about rape, which tend to produce effects; not the graphicness of the material and definitely not the sexual explicitness of the material. I think research has been fairly conclusive, particularly in the last year in trying to systematically identify what the effects, if there are effects, are due to. I do not want to be redundant on the statement, but there is no question that if you are dealing strictly with sexual material, no matter how explicit, there has not been to my knowledge in the last 20 years of research on the topic, any evidence of any type of negative, asocial or damaging effect on individuals so exposed to that material. If we are talking about violent material then that is another issue. (Evidence, p. 63)”
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Evangelical Psychologists
In the Harradine report, the authors say that Dr John Court argued strongly before the Committee in support of the view that NVE material does do serious, if more subtle, harm. The report says that “Court’s arguments offered a detailed critique of Donnerstein’s no-harm findings”, however, it does not quote Court’s criticisms. The authors mention that “Dr Court presented to the Committeee a resume of research by social scientists and investigations by various government committees…as well…he provided anecdotal evidence based on his clinical experience”.
John Court is a Christian psychologist, a former leader of the Festival of Light (Carol, 1994) and, as at mid 1999, Director of Counselling at the Adelaide (South Australian) campus of Tabor College, an “evangelical charismatic theological institution”.
Court has published papers and presented evidence to various governmental inquiries purporting to have proven a causal link between viewing pornography and violence, although most researchers have recognised that Court’s work is not reliable.
In 1979, the UK Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (Williams Committee) dismissed Court’s evidence. Senator Zakharov informed the Senate that the British Committee had said about Court:
“We reject his evidence and to the extent that they rely on it, those who quote him.”
adding that from her own experience of Dr Court’s published work, she concurred with the British Committee’s view (Senate Hansard, 20 Aug 1992, p.398) .
In 1990 Court was forced to admit, when pressed by the New Zealand Indecent Publications Tribunal, that there was no proven link between sex crimes and pornography (Carol, 1994, p.75).
The Klugman report states that claims had been made that video material and the availability of portrayals of explicit sex between consenting adults had led to an increase in the crime rate, especially of rape. The report notes that the presentation of such claims had generally been vague and on further inquiry by the Committee, the claims almost invariably stemmed from the writings of Dr Court.
In relation to Court’s claims regarding portrayals of explicit sex between consenting adults, the Klugman report states:
“It is Dr Court’s opinion that:
‘…those who deny the harmful effects of sexually explicit depictions of sex and violence as currently presented in the media, do so in the face of increasingly strong theoretical arguments, and against an accumulation of evidence which ranges across different research strategies and methodologies, including the anecdotal, the cross-sectional, longitudinal, real-life experiments, laboratory experiments and quasi-experiminatal studies.’ (Evidence, p. 207)
In putting forth his argument to the Committee for not allowing video material which shows explicit sex between consenting adults, Dr Court raises the work of a number of social scientists in an effort to explain patterns of human behaviour. Dr Court claims that the research evidence on sexually aggressive material, even in experiments involving only limited exposure with normal adults, has shown adverse effects. Dr Court maintains the work that he and Professor Donnerstein have conducted on the effects of the visual media ‘does not do justice to the widespread availability of videotapes’. (Evidence, p. 224) He notes that:
‘Sufficient evidence is not available to determine the effects which such materials are having on young people because the work is carried out exclusively on adults. Similarly, laboratory research can give only limited comment on the effects in different settings, especially in the home, where videotapes are viewed.’ (Evidence, p.224)
Thus, while Dr Court is willing to embrace the results of the research using sexually aggressive material, even though he acknowledges there are limitations in the laboratory setting, he is not willing to accept the finding of Donnerstein that no effects have been found in relation to sexually explicit material. He criticises the artificial nature of the experiments saying he believes “that he [Donnerstein] has created an experimental dichotomy which is not comparable to the real world situation (Evidence, p. 227)”.
Moreover, he claims that Donnerstein’s work cannot ‘relate adequately to the natural environment where real people react to explicit materials freely selected to bring the arousal they seek’. He continues:
‘If there was really no effect there would be no commercial market. My own introduction to this area was not as a researcher but as a clinician working with people with sexual problems of various kinds like child molesters, transvestites and so on, who presented the material which was for them sexually arousing. The material was clearly sexually explicit material, not sexually aggressive material. They showed distinct arousal on all sorts of measures.
There is then arousal from sexually explicit materials.’ (Evidence, p. 228)
While few, if any, would deny that sexually explicit materials may have an arousal affect, there would be no agreement that sexual arousal is necessarily harmful.”
Regarding claims that portrayals of explicit sex between consenting adults had led to an increase in the crime rate, Court had published a series of papers dealing with trends in Australian and overseas sex crimes, stressing the criminal effects of pornography. The Klugman report discusses Court’s claims in one of these papers (‘Sex and Violence: A Ripple Effect’ in Neil N. Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Eds), Pornography and Sexual Aggression, Academic Press, Florida, 1984) in which he seeks to establish an association between what he calls porno-violence and rape. He claimed that rape reports have increased where pornography laws have been liberalised:
“In all these places [United States, England and Wales, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Australia, New Zealand] there has been a notable increase in rape reports over the decade 1964-1974…All the places noted have an upward trend consistent with the observation that liberalization of pornography laws corresponds to an increase in rape rates.”
Court also maintained that areas where “porno-violence” is not liberalised do not show a steep rise in rape reports and cited Singapore as an example.
In regard to those claims, the Klugman report indicates difficulties experienced by Committee members in accepting Court’s evidence:
“In trying to determine the validity of this argument of an association between pornography and sexual offences we found difficulty in accepting Dr Court’s propositions on a number of counts. The interchangeable use of the terms ‘pornography’ and ‘porno-violence’ in his findings troubled us. Dr Court lists propositions under the heading ‘Propositions for an Association Between Rape and Porno-Violence’, yet in the discussion he maintains ‘the case is made for an association between the availability of pornography and the increased incidence of serious sexual offences, specifically rape’. Further in his discussion Dr Court says:
‘…this chapter has highlighted the term porno-violence as a subcategory of pornography in order to identify a circumscribed class of materials that is more readily identifiable than pornography and that for both theoretical and experimental reasons can be linked with indisputable harm. One may argue for the containment of porno-violence while having a quite different view in relation to other forms of pornography.'”
The authors of the Klugman report also note that the figures for the period require more explanation than given by Court. Dr Gus Brannigan (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary) provided a critical analysis of the data Court used and noted that Court:
“…presents data from several jurisdictions to suggest that rape has increased where pornography laws have been liberalised. As usual, not a jot of data is presented to establish that change has taken place, nor is there any independent variable reflecting the change in the actual circulation of pornography. One is supposed to presume that something happens between 1964 and 1974 and one is supposed to assume that the change was not already underway prior to this.”
The Klugman report provides further information regarding Dr Brannigan’s analysis:
“Dr Brannigan maintains that Dr Court’s use of the statistics ‘is a text-book case of how to misrepresent the situation with statistics’. A careful study of the statistical data Court uses shows that the Scandanavian data is urban (Copenhagen, Stockholm) whereas the Commonwealth data is national. Court cites Singapore as a case where reports have not risen because of the non-liberalisation of pornography. As Dr Brannigan points out Stockholm has an increase in the frequency of rape reports for the period 1964-1974 of 41 percent. Singapore also has an increase, a 69 per cent increase for the same period. Dr Brannigan says:
‘Court counsels against comparison of the actual levels of rape because of definitional problems across jurisdictions, though this strikes me as rather convenient since Williams had already reproached Court for contrasting rapes in liberal England with illiberal Singapore when, in fact, the rate of rape is lower in England, where pornography has been available, contrary to everything Court has preached.’
The second point Dr Brannigan makes concerning Dr Court’s 1964-1975 data ‘is that it hides a decline in the rate of rape, also brought to Court’s attention in the Williams report’. Dr Brannigan pointed out to the Committee that the Williams Committee report, clearly showed that there had been a decline in rape and attempted rape through 1972 to 1977. Dr Court, by taking the 1964 figure and the 1974 figure and giving a percentage change, provides an increment figure which in fact misrepresented the overall trend. As Dr Brannigan notes Dr Court’s data ‘falsely depicts an increase where the trend has been the opposite’.
In relation to the current debate and video material the 1964-1974 rape report data, used by Dr Court to support his assertion of an association between the availability of pornography, and the increased incidence of rape cannot be used to show correlation between pornography and rape in countries from which the data was drawn. His findings can have no reference at all to Australia and even if a correlation were established it does not establish a causal connection.”
Sean Gabb, in The Case Against Sex Censorship: A Conservative View quotes the UK Williams Committee report regarding evidence “submitted by one Dr Court, reviewed at para 6.31:
‘First, in relation to the availability of pornography in England and Wales, it needs to be said that no information exists to provide any kind of index. In the papers submitted to us, Dr Court did not attempt to provide such information. He does however treat Britain as a “liberal” country in which the detrimental effects of pornography are to be seen, and he identifies two times at which, he suggests, pornography became increasingly available – first with a change in the law introduced by the Obscene Publications Act of 1964, and subsequently following the impetus of the American Commission Report on Pornography in 1970. Dr Court offers nothing to substantiate his statement and we find his explanation of the significance of these two dates less than convincing. As we have explained earlier, the Obscene Publications Act 1964 was a minor measure designed to strengthen the existing law by plugging two loopholes which had been found in the Act of five years previously. … Nor do we know of any authority for the suggestion that pornography became more freely available here after 1970 as a result of the influence of the Report of the US Commission. It seems to us that the choice of the years 1964 and 1970 as crucial in the increasing availability of pornography is purely arbitrary.'” (Gabb, 1998)
The Klugman report highlights the use of Court’s inaccurate data by those seeking increased censorship:
“Mrs Betty Hocking, the Family Team Member for Fraser on the Education and Community Affairs Committee of the former ACT House of Assembly, drew upon Court’s statistical work to support her position. She said:
‘Also there is this latest graph which contrast what has happened in Queensland in South Australia, where you see that the rape rate has gone up substantially since the availability of pornography in South Australia. I believe that it is harmful to everybody, but that the problem is not so much in the legislation in the ACT or anywhere else; the problem is letting it into the country in the first place. It should be stopped at the point of entry. You cannot police it properly once it is here.’
In response to Mrs Hocking’s statement the Committee sought further details:
‘MR JULL – That graph that you are quoting there; whose statistics are those, just for our reference?
Mrs Hocking – They come from Dr John Court, Director of Spectrum Psychological and Counselling Centre, Adelaide.
CHAIRMAN – What years do they compare?
Mrs Hocking – They are comparing 1964 to 1977.
CHAIRMAN – Do you know when videos came into Australia?
Mrs Hocking – No.
CHAIRMAN – Would you be surprised to hear that theywere not here before 1976?
Mrs Hocking – Yes, but the pornography was gradually increasing on television and in our Hollywood films for many years before that.’
Dr Brannigan, in commenting on Dr Court’s work, says:
‘I suspect at times that he is writing for members of the anti-pornography crusade, the critics of pornography, into whose hands such works fall and very speedily are brought to the attention of politicians.'”
The X-Rated Hoax: A tale of harridans, charlatans & poppycock (Cont’d)
“Zealots will always want to enforce their position. And zealotry I think is a greater danger to women than pornography.”
– Erica Jong, Author.
Evangelical Psychologists (cont’d)
The Committee took public evidence on two occasions from the Australian Institute of Criminology, some of which is referred to in the Klugman report:
“To say that certain kinds of offences have increased whilst pornography is increasing is not sustainable according to the Institute. Professor Harding [the then Director of the Institute] maintains this conclusion cannot be reliably reached given the hiatuses in the data, and the many links that have to be made in the causation.
The Institute pointed out that there is a sleeping factor in crime statistics – the extent to which crimes are reported. To illustrated this, the example was given of the higher rape figures for South Australia where the then extensive infrastructure – police force, rape crisis services and hospitals – has more than likely contributed to a greater readiness by rape victims to report rapes.
…
In discussing the alleged increase in violence in Australia, it is worth noting that the murder rate per 100,000 population for Australia in 1973-4 was 1.88 and 1.94 in 1986-7. For N.S.W. the respective figures were 1.94 and 1.77. Proportionately, the biggest increase in the Australian statistics occurred in Queensland -from 2.00 in 1973-4 to 2.54 in 1985-6 (the 1986-7 figures are not yet available. In a similar period, the rate for ‘Break, enter and steal’ offences increased from 881 to 1747 per 100,000, motor vehicle theft increased from 375 to 663 and fraud from 234 to 437. While rape reports increased from 5.6 to 12.1, it must be noted that the law was changed in N.S.W. as from 1/7/81 to include cases previously not included. (Rape reports in N.S.W. increased from 6.21 to 11.62 per 100,000 between 1980-1 and 1982-3 – i.e. before the appearance of videos. In the A.C.T. where X-rated videos become legal in 1984 rape reports dropped from 3.91 per 100,000 in 1982-3 to 1.89 in 1986-7). All the above figures are from The Size of the Crime Problem in Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology, ACT, January 1987, plus updated figures supplied by the Institute.”
Court has also published papers attempting to discredit Dr Berl Kutchinsky, of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Copenhagen, who found that:
“The aggregate data on rape and other violent or sexual offenses from four countries where pornography, including aggressive varieties, has become widely and easily available during the period we have dealt with would seem to exclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this availability has had any detrimental effects in the form of increased sexual violence. Especially the data from West Germany are striking since here the only increase in the sexual violence takes place in the form which includes the least serious forms of sexual coercion and where there may have been increases in reporting frequency. As far as the other forms of sexual violence are concerned, the remarkable fact is that they decreased–the more so, the more serious the offense.” (Kutchinksy, 1992).
Commenting on the US Meese Commission hearings, Colleen McEneany notes Court’s presence:
“Antiporn scientists were also brought in to testify the ill effects of porn on society. New findings had just been released which showed that sex crimes decreased in Denmark and West Germany, where hard-core porn was readily available, Dr. John Court stood before the commission to state otherwise. He insisted that the statistics of the study were wrong and that lowered taboos against explicit sex caused a change in attitude and desensitization toward women that inevitably leads to rape and molestation. Dr. Court, like the other doctors and scientists who spoke, had no evidence to prove their statements.” (McEneany, 1998)
In 1990 Court was forced to admit, when pressed by the New Zealand Indecent Publications Tribunal, that there was no proven link between sex crimes and pornography. “As Pally notes, he told the Tribunal
‘What I am saying is that we do not have evidence that there is such a causal link. I cannot sustain it from my data and I don’t know anybody who can.'” (Carol, 1994, p.75).
Nevertheless, Court did not cease attempting to discredit Dr Kutchinsky and Senator Harradine continued, apparently, to prefer Court’s discredited claims over Kutchinsky’s findings.
In 1992 in the Senate, Senator Harradine called into question Kutchinsky’s suitability to have addressed the Australian Institute of Criminology’s conference “The Sex Industry and Public Policy”. Harradine quoted a paper by Dr John H. Court and Dr Judith Reisman which he said “critiques the speech made by Professor Kutchinsky at the [conference] and exposes its inadequacies”. The paper had been provided to the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Telecommunications Technologies (Senate Hansard, 30 Apr 1992, p.1995).
As Senator Zakarov observed:
“Senator Harradine’s objections seemed to focus on the fact that Professor Kutchinsky’s findings, that there had been a 30 per cent decrease in sex crimes in three European countries since the legalisation of adult erotica, were opposed to his personal beliefs that non-violent adult sexual depictions lead otherwise normal human beings to rape or even to kill.” (Senate Hansard, 20 Aug 92, p.398). Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Disneyland
Dr Judith Reisman, co-author with John Court of the above-mentioned paper criticising Professor Kutchinsky’s speech, is an anti-porn crusader also actively opposed to teenage sex education. She is known, among other things, for her attacks on Kinsey whom she claims obtained his evidence about child sexuality from a man who molested over eight hundred children, and her claims that Penthouse, Playboy and Hustler magazines promote child abuse.
Reisman is undoubtedly another favourite of the Australian pro-censorship lobby. In early April 1992, a few weeks before Senator Harradine’s reference to Court and Reisman’s “critique”, Reisman had been in Australia on invitation to testify before the Australian Senate Select Committee on Community Standards during their inquiry into “X” and “R” rated material on pay television. They again invited her to provide a research paper on the effects of “R” rated material in 1994.
Long before that, in 1984, the US Justice Department had given Reisman a grant for $734,371 to study pictures in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. She claims that these magazines published 6,000 cartoons, photos and other illustrations of children between 1954 and 1984. Subsequently, Reagan-appointee Alfred Regnery, who commissioned the study, had to admit that it was a mistake. Avedon Carol writes:
“It was a scientific disaster, riddled with researcher bias and baseless assumptions. The American University (AU), where Reisman’s study had been academically based, actually refused to publish it when she released it, after their independent academic auditor reported on it. Dr Robert Figlio of the University of Pennsylvania told AU that, ‘The term child used in the aggregate sense in this report is so inclusive and general as to be meaningless.’ Figlio told the press, ‘I wondered what kind of mind would consider the love scene from Romeo and Juliet to be child porn’.” (Carol, 1994, p.116) Marcia Pally cites Dr Loretta Haroian, cochair of the plenary session on Child and Adolescent Sexuality at the 1984 World Congress of Sexology, and one of the world’s experts on childhood sexuality, as saying of the Reisman study:
“This is not science, it’s vigilantism: paranoid, pseudoscientific hyperbole with a thinly veiled hidden agenda. This kind of thing doesn’t help children at all. … Her [Reisman’s] study demonstrates gross negligence and, while she seems to have spent a lot of time collecting her data, her conclusions, based on the data, are completely unwarranted. The experts Reisman cites are, in fact, not experts at all but simply people who have chosen to adopt some misinformed, Disneyland conception of childhood that she has. These people are little more than censors hiding behind Christ and children.” (Carol, 1994, p.116). Of Reisman’s testimony at the Meese Commission hearings, Pat Califia says: “her warning that ‘The cartoon scenario is the common setting in erotica/pornography within which the breaking of sexual taboos first appears,’ was not exactly what the Commission needed to put itself over the top.” (Califia, 1986).
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Arousal, Aggression and Bicycles
During several Senate debates, Senator Shirley Walters spoke favourably of Professor Peter Sheehan’s evidence to the Committee (Senate Hansard, 28 Apr 1988, p.2094). Sheehan was then a Professor of Psychology at Queensland University (in 1997 he moved to the Australian Catholic University). During 1987, Sheehan was Chairman of the Cinematograph Films Board of Review (Censorship Review Board) and as at 1998 remained principal consultant to the Office of Film and Literature Classification (censorship office).
Walters quoted comments attributed to Sheehan in the Harradine report that:
“In his evidence to the Committee he claimed that the case against ‘consenting non-violent’ pornography was ‘not proven’. However Sheehan went on to advise that the case is ‘sufficiently strong…that some control seems advisable.’ (Evidence, p.1104)” (p.207) The report continues with “Sheehan argued that”:
“…the critical thing in whether or not there will be these so-called effects of sexually explicit material is how aggressive the person is in the first place…
There is no question that a lot of people are stimulated mildly or strongly by seeing sexually explicit material. When one is aroused one tends to behave as a consequence of that arousal and I think if the person is aggressive aggression will out…In and of itself, I do not think that sexually explicit material divorced from aggression leads to strong negative effects. Once you combine sexually explicit material with aggression you have a different kettle of fish…The critical thing is how much someone is aroused and how aggressive he is in the first place. (Evidence, p.1192)'” (p.207)
It is not made clear in the report what Sheehan, who has long had a particular interest in the effects of media violence on the behaviour and attitudes of children, was arguing for in relation to control of “consenting non-violent” material. However, apparently his evidence impressed the report’s authors because it seems to support their opinion that behavioural science theories and predictions provide sufficient justification for censorship.
In this regard, the Harradine report refers to the “arousal-affect theory”. This and similar theories, and associated experiments, are popular among those calling for increased censorship. For example, Senator Walters claimed:
“We should consider [Sheehan’s evidence] in conjunction with the latest survey put out by Senator Reynolds and the Office of the Status of Women concerning community attitudes to domestic violence. The survey indicates that one in five men accept the use of physical force by a man against his female partner. In other words, the survey says, 22 per cent of men believe it is all right to bash up their wives or hit them. If that is the case, we have a problem. If we believe, as I do and as Professor Sheehan has said, that if there is aggression in someone and the viewing of these videos will stimulate that aggression, we have real problems in the community.” (Senate Hansard, 28 Apr 1988, p.2094). While such attitudes towards women are of course a problem, violence to women was occurring long before “pornography” became widely available. Banning pornography will not change that. It does, however, give approval to the “porn made me do it” excuses of rapists and batterers, enabling criminals to disclaim responsibility for their acts.
In calling for bans on non-violent sexually explicit material, the pro-censorship lobby conveniently ignores, not only the results of experiments testing the theories, but also that the same theories predict, and experiments show, increases in aggression associated with a wide range of non-sexually-explicit material and activities which they do not demand be banned.
The Harradine report states that Sheehan:
“gave evidence to the Committee that ‘in and of itself’ material which falls within Category III [non violent erotica] is not harmful. He did state, however that, when combined with an aggressive personality, this species of pornography could trigger anti-social behaviour. (Evidence, p.1192)” (p.216) The report’s authors then present their own propositions:
“It would appear then that the arousal-affect theory has implications for the use of Category III pornography. The basis of the theory is that ‘any dominant response may be “energized” by a state of increased arousal’ ([Malamuth and Donnerstein, 1982]). This implies that, even if the Committee were to accept that ‘in and of itself’ the effects of Category III material on behavioural goals were not harmful, the frequent use of this material can, nevertheless, be socially undesirable, given its capacity to intensify aggressive responses and to unleash latent aggressions.
…
Theories of behaviour like the arousal-affect theory are not confined to describing deviant behaviour; they describe the mechanisms of general human behaviour. The arousal-affect theory would predict that, in a society where levels of aggression are high, the frequent use of Category III pornography will break down the inhibitions of normal males to violence. The theory predicts that such responses will not be a manifestation of deviance, but something within the ambit of normal behaviour.” (p.216) The Harradine report at this point has moved well into the realms of wild assumption, which appears to be partially predicated on a further remarkable assumption that “normal males” have aggressive personalities. Moreover, “evidence does not support the hypothesis that exposure to nonviolent pornography leads to violence toward women. Most experimental studies show no difference in aggression toward women between subjects exposed to pornographic films and control groups (for reviews, see Donnerstein 1984, Linz & Malamuth 1993). Research outside the laboratory has not demonstrated that exposure to pornography and violence toward women are even correlated, much less causally related. There is evidence that rapists report less exposure to pornography than controls, not more (see Linz & Malamuth 1993 for a review)” (Felson, 1996).
Appendix 7 of the Harradine report, in a brief discussion of the arousal-effect theory, states that this “predicts amongst other things that pornography should increase the arousal of already aggressively aroused individuals” and that “this prediction has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including those of Donnerstein and Berkowitz ([Malamuth and Donnerstein, 1982])”.
Appendix 7 continues:
“The subjects in these experiments were angered, shown a pornographic film and, then, given an opportunity to express their aggression at the expense of a laboratory assistant. When the subjects were shown Category 1 (violent) pornography, and given a chance to behave aggressively toward a female assistant, there were very significant increases in aggression”. (p.746) It should be noted that the Harradine report’s brief description of these types of experiments is extremely simplistic and misleading. In Donnerstein and Berkowitz’s (1981) experiment, for example, the subjects were male undergraduate psychology student volunteers, as they were in most others. That the subjects “were angered” means that they were angered by a female laboratory assistant whom they were later “given a chance” to behave towards in a way that the researchers claim signifies aggression. The subjects were “given a chance” to deliver what they were expected to believe were electric shocks to the female’s fingertips, when she made mistakes regarding a list of word pairings she had supposedly been studying.
The experiment found that those students who viewed rape scenes with either “positive-outcome” (i.e. the rape victim becoming sexually aroused) or “negative-outcome” subsequently administered a higher level of average electric shock frequency to the female laboratory assistant, than did the students who viewed either a sexually non-violent depiction, or a non-sexual/non-violent talk show clip. The electric shock frequency is claimed to signify aggressiveness and, for example, likelihood to commit rape in the outside world. (For more detailed information on how this study was conducted, see Palys, 1994).
Dr Ted Palys notes that the pre-angering, “anger manipulation”, has become a virtual requirement of effects testing, since it seems that if the female does not first anger the man, no effects of exposure to violent pornography are observed (Palys, 1994).
Although the above experiment claims effects from exposure to violent material, the Harradine report claims, based on the arousal-affect theory, that non-violent sexually explicit material (Category III) has a “capacity to intensify aggressive responses and to unleash latent aggressions”. However, the Klugman report notes that Dr Edward Donnerstein (Professor of Communication, Centre for Communication Research, University of Wisconsin), one of the researchers who conducted the above experiment, told the Committee “that in his recent research using video material and viewing the films in their entirety”:
“…it turns out, of the R rated material which we used not one of those films would be allowed in Australia and if they were, most of the material, and in fact from what I understand all of the material which would have produced any effect, would have been censored out. None of the [American] X rated violent material which we used in our research which produced certain types of effects, would be allowed in Australia or any other country than I am aware of. (Evidence, pp.62-63)” Donnerstein also told the Committee that sexually explicit materials “which do not contain physical violence, did not produce any effects whatsoever”. Nevertheless, the Harradine report’s authors continued to prefer theory. They state:
“Even if the Committee were to draw the conclusion that Category III pornography, in and of itself, was not harmful, reliable scientific theories would still predict that, when combined with aggression, of which there is clearly much in our community, materials in Category III could intensify aggressive responses.” (p.218) The Klugman report remarks that a “point which has not been noted in the pro-censorship argument” is seen in Donnerstein’s evidence:
“In fact consistently in the research program when we find effects they come from the violent material. I think what is more important to bring out is that the strongest effects which were obtained did not even occur from video material. If one looks at the research, which you have in front of you, by Neil Malamuth and myself, ‘Pornography and Sexual Aggression’ [1984], most of that was written material, scenarios about rape. In fact it is written material which one can find in any popular magazine or any popular television show… (Donnerstein Evidence p.63)” (p.515) Furthermore, consideration of research into the effects of pornography, to the exclusion of other behavioural science research, can result in misunderstanding or intentional misrepresentation of the findings of the experiments.
Dr Augustine Brannigan (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary) told the Committee:
“…we discover in Donnerstein that among angry subjects aggression – if that is the correct word – can be increased by physical exercise, can be increased by noise. (Evidence, p.1501).”
Moreover, “anything that increases the heart rate or skin temperature may create this ‘aggression’ response; in Edward Donnerstein’s words: ‘And yes, there are studies where males bicycle ride and then are more aggressive when they are angered.'” (Carol, 1994, p.63).
It is a wonder that anti-porn Parliamentary Committees do not recommend banning bicycles.
The X-Rated Hoax: A tale of harridans, charlatans & poppycock (Cont’d)
“In sum, although the ‘effects’ researchers have indeed given us a little bit of knowledge, they may also exemplify the adage that ‘A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing’.”
– Dr Ted Palys, Associate Professor of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Canada, 1994
Distorted, Myopic, and Misleading Findings
Numerous issues have been raised regarding the relevance of behavioural research experiments to the world outside laboratories. For example:
•would the psychology student volunteers, at universities where such research is known to take place, be able to guess the purpose of the study and the theory the researcher wanted to prove;
•if so, could this influence their responses;
•can administering electric shock in controlled laboratory experiments, on instruction of the researcher, be reliably equated with probability of committing violent sexual crimes in the outside world;
•does the frequency of electric shock indicate aggressiveness, or something else, e.g. discomfort with having had to watch rape scenes;
•if the student participants were permitted another means of expression would they choose to administer electric shock, e.g. perhaps verbally communicate with the woman about her incorrect answers, rather than press buttons to punish her;
•etc.
The Klugman report commenting on these types of studies in general, observes that:
“The researchers have favoured models which presuppose an underlying male tendency to aggression which is released by violent stimuli and as a result the test designs have been built around indices of male aggression. As Dr Brannigan (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary) notes this approach means that the most important causal variable is not discovered in the experiments but presumed in the theories.” (p.519) and then quotes Dr Brannigan:
“…the nature of the design of these studies…which requires all the subjects to be initially angered prior to exposure to the various crucial stimuli – which is the pornography – means that the basic effect studied, the aggression, is always an interaction effect and is not attributable directly to the stimulus. Consequently, it is misleading to speak of the ‘effects of pornographic stimuli’, for these are never studied directly. (Evidence, p. 1500) (emphasis [Klugman report’s]).
[The tests use three equivalent groups of subjects constituted from a sample, typically of university students in psychology classes in University in Wisconsin or Manitoba. Groups are created by random assignment. In each of the three groups, subjects are angered by a female confederate who very critically assesses a written assignment prepared by the subjects in what is presented as a learning experiment. Later, these subjects are exposed to one of three kinds of visual stimuli (neutral, erotic, or aggressive pornography). Finally, subjects are asked to ‘teach’ the person who earlier had angered them by administering electric shocks for incorrect responses in a bogus learning experiment in which the subjects choose a shock level on a machine where eight keys are represented as eight levels of graduated shock severity. This is the measure of aggression, “O”. (Evidence, pp. 1464-1465)]”
Dr Brannigan also said:
“As for the aggression, one must surely be surprised that having limited the response of these people in these experiments to an aggressive one, and paying head exclusively to male subjects shocking of female confederates, the levels of shock given do not seem to be much consistent with the extreme forms of violence for which they are proxy. In the key experiments that we reviewed the highest level of shock was 5.3 out of an eight-point scale. Is this the sort of score from which we want to extrapolate regarding rape and assault? I prefer to see something approaching the very top of the scale, though this is never found. (Evidence, p. 1500)
Regarding the variations in scores of aggression at the shock machine, how seriously can they be taken when we discover in Donnerstein that among angry subjects aggression – if that is the correct word – can be increased by physical exercise, can be increased by noise. (Evidence, p. 1501)”
Dr Ted Palys, Associate Professor of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, writes in his paper prepared for the Canadian case of Little Sister’s [Book and Art Emporium] versus the Queen in 1994 that:
“Taken collectively, the [research] literature shows that, under certain unique conditions, male undergraduate student volunteers will deliver stronger average electrical shocks to the fingertips of women after they have been exposed to violent video pornography than when they have been exposed to either sexually explicit but non-violent material, or neutral (non-sexual, non-violent) videos. The main question to be considered here is, ‘Should the court be convinced, on the basis of this evidence, that the existence of harms following exposure to violent pornography has been demonstrated?’ This question can be addressed by more careful consideration of how the ‘rules of social psychological laboratory experimentation’, when followed in as exemplary a fashion as has been the case in the Donnerstein & Berkowitz (1981) research, can create a distorted, myopic, and misleading set of findings when these are used to make predictions about the world outside the laboratory. In sum, although the ‘effects’ researchers have indeed given us a little bit of knowledge, they may also exemplify the adage that ‘A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing’.” (Palys, 1994) (Dr Palys’s paper, written for the law firm that represented Little Sister’s, provides an interesting analysis of the laboratory experiment as a site of study and commentary on the relation between research and policy.)
Given the arousal/aggression predictions of these behaviourial science experiments are claimed as justification for banning sexually explicit material, one wonders why the censorship advocates do not seek the banning of a vast range of other material and activities. As Marcia Pally comments:
“A good deal of material seems to suggest that if you show males violent, nonsexual material, their aggression will increase in the laboratory. Yet if you show people Jane Fonda workout tapes in the laboratory and require that they follow the aerobic program, their aggressive responses will increase following the movie. The common denominator is physical arousal. If you increase heartbeat, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and adrenaline level, a subject’s actions will be enhanced – not only aggression but also generosity and kindness. That tells us little about how violence occurs outside the laboratory and more about banning Jane Fonda.
By contrast, some researchers have investigated how violence occurs in life. In her field studies, Dr. Susanne Ageton found that, among adolescents, membership in a delinquent peer group accounted for three-quarters of all sexual aggression. Other factors, including exposure to sexual material and attitudes about women, accounted for 19 percent. Dr. Judith Becker, who served on the Meese commission, found that crimes committed by adolescents, like those committed by adults, are linked to sexual and physical abuse experienced in childhood and to alcohol consumption, not to exposure to sexually explicit material.” (Pally, 1996)
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Government Inquiries outside Australia
In Appendix 8, the Harradine report acknowledges that “it is important to recognise that the relevance of this evidence has been challenged by certain witnesses called before the Committee and, perhaps most notably, by the report of the Fraser Committee.” (p.751)
Prior to the Report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material, reports had been issued by four other government inquiries. These were the 1970 USA Federal Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the 1979 British Williams Committee, the 1985 Canadian Fraser Commission and the 1986 USA Meese Commission.
Wilson and Nugent write that the first three of those inquiries came to the same conclusions as the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) in relation to non-violent pornography:
“In its submission to the Joint Select Committee on Video Material, the Institute stated that, in relation to soft pornography, there was ‘no convincing criminological evidence that exposure to such material produced measurable harm to society’. In relation to hard-core pornography, the Institute was of the opinion that there was no proven link between this category of material on the other hand, and sex offences on the other.” (Wilson & Nugent, 1987)
1979 British Williams Committee
For the main recommendations of the 1979 UK Williams Committee see The Case Against Sex Censorship: A Conservative View by Sean Gabb.
1985 Canadian Fraser Commission
In relation to the Fraser Commission, the Klugman report states:
“The Fraser Committee was ‘not prepared to state, solely on the basis of the evidence and research it has seen, that pornography is a significant causal factor in the commission of some forms of violent crime, in the sexual abuse of children, or the disintegration of communities and society (Fraser, p. 99)'” (p.549) and:
“The Fraser Committee recognised the degrading nature of the sexually explicit violent material and recommended sanctions. The Fraser Committee made the point that much of the material which people brought to their attention was presented as material which degrades women. Noting the subjective use of the term ‘degrading’, the Fraser Committee limited its own use of the term to the sexually explicit violent material which they believed was the most subversive of social values.” (p.537)
1986 USA Meese Commission
According to Wilson and Nugent:
“The Meese Commission concluded that substantial exposure to non-violent pornography bears some relationship to adverse attitudinal changes relating to rape and other forms of sexual violence. It is important to note that there have been suggestions of alleged political bias in the formation and determinations of the Meese Commission. Nobile and Nadler believe that the Commission’s verdict was a foregone conclusion due to its leading terms of reference and its conservative membership.” (Wilson & Nugent, 1987) Furthermore, the Meese Commission “hired Canadian sociologist Edna F. Einsiedel to review and summarize existing studies that might have a bearing on their findings. She reported,
‘No evidence currently exists that actually links fantasies with specific sexual offenses; the relationship at this point remains an inference.’ She also noted that pornography has been of value to some therapists who use it to treat patients. For writing this report, Einsiedel was placed under a gag order obtained by Alan Sears (executive director of the Commission), and her summation does not appear in the Commission’s Final Report.” (Califa, 1986)
Dr Judith Becker and Ellen Levine, two dissenting Commissioners on the Meese Commission, said:
“…It is essential to state that the social science research has not been designed to evaluate the relationship between exposure to pornography and the commission of sexual crimes; therefore efforts to tease the current data into proof of a causal link between these acts simply cannot be accepted. Furthermore, social science does not speak to harm, on which this Commission focuses. Social science speaks of a relationship among variables or effects that can be positive or negative (Meese, p.204).” (Joint Select Committee, p.516)
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
The Aftermath
In April 1988, the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), a non-statutory office within the Attorney-General’s portfolio, was established, headed by John Dickie in the position of Chief Censor/Director of the OFLC.
On 29 June 1988, State Attorneys General (Censorship Ministers) met and considered the recommendations of the Joint Select Committee. The Ministers did not approve Recommendation 1, that is, the creation of a new “Non-Violent Erotica” category to replace the “X” classification. Instead, they recommended to the Federal Government that it place a ban on X-rated material. Speaking in the Senate, Senator Zakharov said:
“…I understand that the concern at the Attorneys-General meeting was about violence. X-rated videos are non-violent. …The most violent video material which is legally available in this country is that which is classified R, yet before and after the meeting of the Attorneys-General we read and heard interviews with State Ministers who clearly had been wrongly advised and/or had not done their own homework because they thought that, by recommending that X-rated material not be available, they had done something significant to prevent violence. It was irrelevant to violence.” (Senate Hansard, 6 Apr 1989, p.1124) Also at the June 1988 meeting, new film and video classification guidelines were approved by Censorship Ministers and adopted by the OFLC to accommodate the concerns of The Joint Select Committee on Video Material, especially in relation to violent material. (The Committee had recommended that the word “relished” be added). The Ministers also requested the Chief Censor and the Chairman of the Films Board of Review to tighten up the application of the guidelines to films which contained violence and were in the top end of the “M” and “R” categories. (Senate Hansard, 4 Dec 1990, p.4938)
On 15 August 1988, the Melbourne Age published the results of a public opinion poll under the heading “43% want X rated videos banned, opinion poll shows”. This was incorrect and The Age subsequently published a correction. The correct number was 3%, not 43%. The error arose from ongoing myths and misunderstanding about the contents of X-rated videos. The question asked in the poll was:
“There has been some discussion recently about X rated video cassettes. Some people say that videos depicting sex or violence should be banned.” The question then asked specifically what should be banned and produced a very contradictory result. This was that 43% wanted X-rated material banned but only 3% thought that explicit sex, that is, the real contents of X-rated material, should be banned. In other words, 3% thought that real X-rated videos should be banned and the other 40% were confused by the incorrect information in the question, incorrectly believing X-rated videos contained violence. (Senate Hansard, 6 Apr 1989, p.1124)
On 4 December 1990, the Federal Government’s response to the Report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material was tabled in the Senate. By this time, the Government had either implemented or set in train many of the recommendations in the Committee’s 1988 report. A number of the Committee’s recommendations were referred to the Australian Law Reform Commission on 10 May 1990. This resulted in the next round of “uniform national” censorship legislation: the Commonwealth Classification (Publications Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 and complementary State and Territory enforcement legislation effective from 1996. This legislation was no more uniform nation-wide than prior attempts. It did however bring increased censorship.
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
Summary
Although the Joint Select Committee’s findings were finely balanced between opposing viewpoints, and despite a majority recommendation in favour of an NVE (non-violent erotica) category, the forces of repression ultimately won the day. Bans imposed by the States in the mid 1980’s are still in place, nothwithstanding that the community clearly supports non-violent sexually explicit video material being freely available to adults.
The Committee found no evidence that non-violent sexually explicit material causes violence or aggression. The evidence was to the contrary, that it does not. Research and studies since 1988 also support that fact.
X-rated (non violent erotica) videos were banned because of fear, uncertainty, doubt and lies, promulgated by a vocal minority of primarily religious morals crusaders.
State Attorneys General succumbed to the fear mongering campaign – perhaps some believed they were banning depictions of sexual violence; perhaps some, like the morals crusaders, were personally affronted by pictures of happy, consenting sex.
The crusaders spoke about violence and sexually explicit material in the same breath, they misled and/or outright lied, they exploited the ignorance of members of the public, the media and politicians about the true contents of X-rated videos. In so doing, they gained support for the banning of non-violent material, from people who thought they were supporting the banning of sexually violent material. Few campaigners were concerned about the portrayal of sexual violence, that remains permitted to this day in the “R” classification.
“It’s easy to refute the sex lies of the [religious] right using data from biology, medicine, criminology and developmental psychology. But the right doesn’t use language to communicate facts about sex. Instead, it conveys emotions about sex– fear, hatred, self-disgust. Those emotions are far from what sex should and can be. Yet those emotions are shaping public policy.” (Klein, 1996)
The “harm” of pornography the crusaders claim is to “community standards”, or rather, to the standards desired by the religious guardians of public morals. They seek to enforce their own beliefs about sex and their own puritan lifestyles on other people, apparently believing that censorship will achieve these objectives.
They speak of pornography causing “sexually calloused” attitudes towards women, of it causing a “manipulative orientation” towards women. They rarely explain what they mean by these terms. They mean that “pornography” may encourage beliefs contrary to their own: beliefs that women should be able to choose lifestyles without marriage or motherhood; that women may enjoy sexual activity and choose to participate in it outside the moral crusaders’ approved confines of pleasing a husband or making babies; that homosexuality is not sinful. They mean that pornography might give people ideas. Ideas that sex is not shameful, that sex for fun is okay, normal in fact.
Make no mistake, they do not campaign to “protect” women, they campaign to subjugate women. They seek to deny women the fundamental right to do as they please with their own bodies. Their attitudes are demeaning to both women and men unlike the vast majority of the images they so vehemently oppose. They infer the female body is obscene, that women who enjoy sexual activity are abnormal and ought to be ashamed. They infer that men are animalistic creatures incapable of controlling their own behaviour, incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. In blaming “pornography” for violence, they offer criminals excuses for their behaviour, relieving them of reponsibility for their crimes. They seek to put women back in houses with white picket fences, to keep them fearful of attack if they should so much as dare to admit they are sexual beings.
The Harradine report borrowed much from the USA Meese Commission report. In the opinion of Dr. John Money (Professor Emeritus of Medical Psychology, John Hopkins University Hospital):
“The Meese Commission affirms that women have no right to be sexual. Can you believe it? Even the sexual normalcy of the naked human body and of healthy, happy people having sexual intercourse must be suppressed… the deceptive purpose of the Meese report is to deny women’s equality with men” (Baron et al, 1987) The same can be said for the Harradine report.
You are here: Home » The Censorship Debate » The X Hoax » p.9 18 Aug 1999 The X-Rated Hoax: A tale of harridans, charlatans & poppycock (Cont’d)
“How long will it take oppressed groups to learn that if we give the state enough rope, it will wind up around our necks?”
– Ellen Willis, journalist and professor, New York University.
Conclusion
Censorship in Australia has been increasing since 1984. Many people believe that the forces of darkness will lose political influence now that Brian Harradine has lost the balance of power in the Senate (from 1 July 1999). These people are sadly mistaken. Harradine did not gain the balance of power until the early 1990s, long after X-rated videos were banned from sale in all States.
“Australia is a live and let live, secular, modern society. So why are the politics of censorship heading off in quite another direction? The answer, discovered mid-decade by the pollsters of both Labor and the Coalition parties, is that it’s not the confident, relaxed, 70 per cent of Australia that decides who is in power, but the anxious, at times vindictive, often militantly Christian 30 per cent.” (Marr, 1999)
Harradine is merely a figurehead, a representative of the militant Christian lobby who maintain a stranglehold over politicians and thereby over what other people are permitted to see, read and hear in the privacy of their own home and elsewhere. Harradine has been a convenient scapegoat for other moralistic, authoritian politicians to hide behind. Absent Harradine, other pro-censorship politicians may be forced to come out of the closet. “Harradine made us do it” is no longer remotely credible.
In October 1997, Attorney-General Darryl Williams said:
“One of the criteria for determining whether a film should be classified ‘R’ or ‘X’ or a publication given a restricted classification is whether the material is ‘likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult’. This is the other sense in which the ‘reasonable adult’ test occurs and acknowledges that individuals may have different personal tastes. In other words, although some reasonable adults may find the material offensive, and thus justify a restricted classification for it, others may not. They should be allowed to have access to the material if they wish.” (Williams, 1997)
If that was ever true insofar as the Coalition Commonwealth Government is concerned, it is clearly not true in relation to State Governments claimed to participate in the “national uniform” censorship system.
Williams also said:
“The Government does not wish to return to the repressive censorship practices of the past. The Government recognises that the right of adults to choose for themselves in these matters is fundamentally important. We will not lightly interfere with those rights.” (Williams, 1997)
Yet, in less than two years, we have seen increased censorship of television, films, videos, publications, telephone calls and new legislation to censor Internet content even more restrictively than off-line media. All of this is more often than not justified on the claimed grounds of “protecting” women and children from the “harm of pornography”.
Silent majorities will never win the censorship wars. Until many more Australians are prepared to publicly demand that politicians and the Religious Right get out of everyone else’s bedrooms and private lives; to laugh at people who attempt to make them feel ashamed of their sexuality, or of looking at pictures of happy, consenting sexual activity; censorship in Australia will continue to increase. Meanwhile, sexual abuse of women and children will continue, and quite possibly also increase.
Pornography is not the cause of violence and aggression, nor of negative attitudes towards women. Research since 1988 continues to confirm this fact. The roots of these problems lie in repressive attitudes towards sexuality, sexist attitudes and “community standards” passed down through generations; standards that say certain types of force against women are acceptable, even manly, that say women stereotyped as “bad girls” deserve whatever they get. A very small percentage of pornography reflects these standards (which is not permitted in the Australian X-classification anyway) but it certainly did not cause them. It is worth remembering that these attitudes have become less common over the same period that pornography has become available to the masses in literature, if not on film. Males who report greater exposure to pornography have more (not less) liberal attitudes toward gender roles (Reiss 1986).
The anti-censorship argument that free speech for “pornographers” must be supported purely on principle is misguided and wrong. Firstly, it does not address the Religious Right’s “harm” arguments. Secondly, there are far more important reasons for supporting adults’ freedom to choose to view pornography:
“Suppression of pornography is not just a free speech issue: Attempts to stifle sexual expression are part of a larger agenda directed at the suppression of human freedom and individuality more generally. It is no coincidence that one of the consequences of democratization and political liberalization in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China was a small explosion of erotic publications.
Sexual expression is perhaps the most fundamental manifestation of human individuality. Erotic material is subversive in the sense that it celebrates, and appeals to, the most uniquely personal aspects of an individual’s emotional life. Thus, to allow freedom of expression and freedom of thought in this realm is to promote diversity and non-conformist behavior in general…” (Mongiovi)
And that is what the Religious Right and authoritarian, patriarchal politicians fear. It’s not about pornography at all, it’s about individual freedoms.
Other reasons to defend adults’ freedom to view pornography include:
•Banning pornography is potentially dangerous for women and children. In Denmark in the late 60’s, the incidence of sex crimes, sexual violence towards women and children, dropped markedly when pornography was made freely available. In 1967, erotic material in Denmark was removed from the obscenity statute. This resulted in sex crimes in Denmark, which had been stable from 1958 to 1966, decreasing by 25 percent in 1967, 13 percent in 1968 and 30.5 percent in 1969. (Petersen 1999, Kutchinsky 1992)
•Banning pornography distracts attention and preventative action from the actual causes of violence: restrictive and punitive home environments, sexual and physical abuse during childhood, alcohol, etc. Politicians get to falsely claim they’ve “done something” while ignoring what could be done; criminals get to disclaim responsibility for their acts pleading “porn made me do it”.
•Pornography has socially beneficial effects. Sexual health professionals recommend it as an aid to enhancing failing relationships and helping couples and individuals learn about and experiment with sex. AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases have made it a public health necessity to promote safe sex practices. Governments who ban, or even discourage, patently safe sexual practices, i.e. watching erotic videos, are not only irresponsible, but a danger to society.
•Give government enough rope and it will wind up around your neck. How long will it be before your harmless sexual practices, your fantasies, are excluded from the charmed circle of government approved sex?
The debate over censorship of pornography does not, as Harradine claims:
“[boil] down to what priority is given to the porn merchants’ claimed right of freedom of expression as against the responsibility of governments to uphold the essential common good of a free, equal and life-affirming society” (Harradine, 1998).
Rather, it is about ordinary, normal, Australian citizens’ fundamental human right to read, see and hear information about human sexuality. It is about their right to disagree with Harradine’s definition of “a free, equal and life-affirming society”. It is about their constitutional right not to be forced by the State to observe or not observe the practices of any religion.
“116. The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion…” (Australian Constitution).
In the absence of proof of harm caused by pornography, other than perhaps to perceptions of the merits of the Christian Right’s attitude towards sexuality, the Commonwealth Government’s plan to ban depictions of “fetishes” in X-rated (NVE) videos runs perilously close to a law imposing religious observance.
In 1997, the moral crusaders lost the war over government control of consenting adults’ sexual conduct in private. The criminalisation of male homosexuality under the Tasmanian Criminal Code had been found by the UN Human Rights Committee to constitute a violation of the right to privacy at international law, that is, Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
“1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
The Federal Government subsequently introduced a new Australian law:
“Arbitrary interferences with privacy
4.(1) Sexual conduct involving only consenting adults [18 years or more] acting in private is not to be subject, by or under any law of the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory, to any arbitrary interference with privacy within the meaning of Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” (Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994).
The States’ ban on sale of X-rated videos is also an arbitrary interference with privacy of consenting adults’ sexual conduct. So is the Commonwealth Government’s legislation to require ISPs to interfere with the privacy of adults’ access to X-rated material on the Internet. These laws have no purpose other than to attempt to control adults’ sexual conduct, to intimidate, to cause fear. The governments do not ban aids to sexual conduct such as sex toys, nor indeed whips and chains. It is patently ridiculous that they ban mere paper, film and electrons, claiming this will protect women and children. It is nothing more than an attempt to enforce religious observance.
Harradine is wrong in saying:
“The porn merchants coined the title NVE and have been campaigning for it to replace ‘X’ for over 10 years because of the odium attached to the ‘X’ title.
…
Censor the word pornography – call it NVE, “explicit”, anything but what it is. Coming through the whole saga was that Orwellian touch. If you want people to accept bad for good, you must first change the language.” (Harradine, 1998)
It is not the language that has changed, but the contents of X-rated videos after depiction of non-consent of any kind was banned from sexually explicit videos in 1984 (but not from R classified videos which the morals crusaders rarely complain about). Placing non-violent erotica in an “NVE” classification can by no stretch of the imagination be considered “chang[ing] the language”.
The Orwellian touch resides with those who would disallow the use of precise language to describe material they personally dislike, or their religion tells them they must learn to dislike.
Enforcing religious observance has no legitimate place in Australian law. Governments have been unable to demonstrate that laws banning sale or availability of X-rated material to adults have any other purpose. Such laws should be repealed. A happier, healthier, more diversity tolerant, less sexually violent society would likely result.
Author: Irene Graham
Go to Contents List
——————————————————————————–
References
Baron, Lynn, Money, Staples, Straus and Zilbergeld, 1987, ‘The Meese Commission Report Distorts The Scientific Evidence’, Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues In Human Sexuality, Robert T. Francoeur, Ed. Guilford: The Dushkin Publishing Group, 1987: 254-263, in Guy McArthur, ‘Should Porn Be Banned?’,
[BROKEN LINK] <http://www.seds.org/~smiley/articles/porn.html> (12 Jul 1999)
Califa, Pat 1986, ‘The Obscene, Disgusting, and Vile Meese Commission Report’, Cultronix, 1994,
<http://eserver.org/cultronix/califia/meese/> (21 Dec 2003, 1 Aug 1999)
Carol, Avedon 199-, The Harm of Porn: Just Another Excuse to Censor,
<http://www.fiawol.demon.co.uk/FAC/harm.htm>.
Carol, Avedon 1994, Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes: Pornography and Censorship, New Clarion Press, Gloucester.
Coonan, Helen 1997, Censorship Revisited, Discussion Paper No. 1, presented to meeting of the Sydney Institute, April 1997.
Court, John, ‘Sex and Violence: A Ripple Effect’, in Neil N. Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Eds), Pornography and Sexual Aggression, Academic Press, Florida, 1984, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Court, John 1990, testimony to New Zealand Indecent Publications Tribunal, P.J. Cartwright, Chair, Wellington, N.Z., transcripts, in Carol 1994.
Donnerstein, E. & Berkowitz, L. 1981, ‘Victim reactions in aggressive erotic films as a factor in violence against women’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(4), 710-724, in Palys, 1994.
Donnerstein Edward, Linz, Daniel & Penrod, Stephen 1987, The Question of Pornography: Research Findings and Policy Implications, Free Press, New York, in Carol, 1994.
Evans, Gareth 1983, ‘New Uniform Video Censorship System’, Attorney-General’s Press Release, 13 Jul 83, Incorporated in Hansard (Senate), 14 Jun 84, p.3037.
Evans, Gareth 1984a, ‘New Censorship Classification Scheme for Publications and Videotapes’, Attorney-General’s Press Release, 31 Jan 84, Incorporated in Hansard (Senate), 14 Jun 84, p.3037.
Evans, Gareth 1984c, ‘Ministers Reach General Agreement on Video Censorship’, Attorney-General’s Press Release, 6 Apr 84, Incorporated in Hansard (Senate), 14 Jun 84, p.3037.
Felson, Richard 1996, ‘Mass media effects on violent behavior’, Annual Review of Sociology, v. 22. Part II,
[BROKEN LINK] <http://www-cj.nmu.edu/zupan/art8.htm> (3 Aug 1999)
Festival of Light 1998, ‘Farewell, faithful servants’, FOL: Current Issues Newsletter, Undated,
<http://www.fol.org.au/folcur.htm#Farewell, faithful servants> (14 Jul 1999).
Gabb, Sean 1998, The Case Against Sex Censorship: A Conservative View, Libertarian Alliance, London, 1992
<http://vzone.virgin.net/old.whig/proporn.htm> (14 Jul 1999).
Harradine, Brian 1998, ‘Where decency stumbled, X marks the spot’, The Australian, 25 Nov 98, Opinions section,
<http://www.pastornet.net.au/fwn/1999/jan/art07.htm> (14 Jul 1999)
Horin, Adele 1984, ‘Women and Pornography: the New Censors’, National Times, 30 Mar 84, p.12-13, Incorporated in part in Hansard (Senate), 4 Apr 84, p.1179,
<http://libertus.net/censor/docarchive/840404-1179ge.html>
House of Representatives Hansard (Australia), available from Parliament House online database <http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/index.htm>
Joint Select Committee on Video Materials 1988, Report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Materials, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988.
Klein, Marty 1996, ‘The Sex Lies of the Religious Right: How conservatives distort the facts of life’, Playboy Forum, January 1996,
<http://www.sexuality.org/l/activism/marty.html> (12 Jul 1999)
Kutchinsky, Berl 1991, Pornography, Sex Crime, and Public Policy, paper presented to the Australian Institute of Criminology Conference “The Sex Industry and Public Policy”, 6-8 May 1991. <http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/proceedings/14/kutchinsky.pdf> (PDF file 77Kb)
Lumby, Catharine 1997, Bad Girls: the Media, Sex & Feminism in the 90s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. (Chapter 5 online at:
[BROKEN LINK] <http://www.allen-unwin.com.au/trade/suckcl.htm>)
McEneany, Colleen, 1998, Pornography and Feminism, 1997-98,
<http://www.amazoncastle.com/feminism/porn.shtml>
McKay, H.B. & Dolff, D.J. 1984, ‘The Impact of Pornography: An Analysis of Research and Summary of Findings’, Working Papers on Pornography and Prostitution Report No. 3, Department of Justice, Canada, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Malamuth, N. and Donnerstein, E. 1982, ‘The Effect of Aggressive-Pornographic Mass Media Stimuli’, p. 123, in L. Berkowitz, (Ed), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 15, Academic Press, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Malamuth N. and Donnerstein E. 1984, (Eds), Pornography and Sexual Aggression, Academic Press, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Marr, David 1999, ‘Fighting for our souls at the flicks’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jun 1999,
<http://web.archive.org/web/20000815061058/www.smh.com.au/news/9906/21/ features/features2.html> (21 Jun 1999)
Mongiovi, Gary, in Pacheco, Richard 1998, ‘Love and a Good Right Hook’ <http://bettydodson.com/pornweek.htm> (18 Aug 99)
Nobile, P. and Nadler, E. (1985), United States of America vs Sex: How the Meese Commission Lied About Pornography, Minotaur Press, New York, 1985, in Wilson and Nugent, 1987.
Pally, Marcia 1996, ‘Do Movies and Music Cause Violence? Sex, Cyberspace, and the First Amendment’, Cato Institute Policy Forum, 8 Dec,
<http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/pr-jf-sx.html> (4 Aug 1999)
Palys, T.S. 1994, Statement of Dr. Ted S. Palys: Comments on the Statement by Dr. Neil Malamuth,
<http://www.sfu.ca/~palys/lilsis.htm> (5 Aug 1999)
Petersen, Patricia 1999, Speech at Brisbane Anti-Censorship Rally, 28 May 99
<http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/may28/petersen.html>
Reiss, I.L. 1986, Journey into Sexuality: An Exploratory Voyage, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, in Felson, 1996.
Sheehan, Peter 1997, ‘The Effects of Watching Violence in the Media: Policy, Consensus, and Censorship Private’, presented at the Violence, Crime and the Entertainment Media Conference, Australian Institute of Criminology and the Office of Film and Literature Classification, 4-5 December 1997
<http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/violence/sheehan.pdf> (5 Jun 1999)
Senate Hansard (Australia), available from Parliament House online database
<http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/index.htm>
Weaver, James B. 1987, ‘Effects of Portrayals of Female Sexuality and Violence against Women on the Perceptions of Women’, Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University, July 1987, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Williams, Daryl 1997, ‘From Censorship to Classification: An Address by the Attorney-General the Hon Daryl Williams AM QC’, E Law – Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law, Vol 4, No 4, December 1997,
<http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v4n4/will441.html> (7 Jul 1998)
Wilson, Paul & Nugent, Stephen 1987, ‘Sexually Explicit and Violent Media Material: Research and Policy Implications’, Trends & Issues in Criminal Justice, No. 9, Australian Institute of Criminology, December 1987
<http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/ti09.pdf> (7 Jul 1999).
Zillman, D. and Bryant, J. 1984, ‘Effects of Massive Exposure to Pornography’, in N. Malamuth and E. Donnerstein, (Eds), Pornography and Sexual Aggression, p.115-138, Academic Press, 1984, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Zillman, D. 1986, ‘Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography’, paper prepared for the Surgeon General’s Workshop on Pornography and Public Health, Arlington, Virginia, June 22-24, 1986, p.15, in Joint Select Committee Report, 1988.
Fallacies & Urban Myths
“The threat to our liberty lies not with the evil-minded ruler – for men born to freedom are quick to resist tyranny – rather it lies with men of zeal – well meaning, but lacking in understanding.”
– Justice Louis Brandeis – USA Supreme Court
During the mid 1990s the pro-censorship lobby continually cited unidentified “research”, “studies” and other assorted “evidence” to support their demands for greater censorship. This page identifies some of the false and/or misleading information – frequently myths and half-truths – which was commonly used (some of which continues to be promulgated intermittently).
See separate pages for information about other fallacies, myths, false/misleading ‘statistics’, etc. in common use more recently, and information and links to studies and research findings of a more reputable/factual nature.
Contents:
•Fallacies and Urban Myths
◦Martin Bryant & 2000 Violent Videos
◦Ted Bundy & Pornography Made Me Do It
◦Wade Frankum & American Psycho
◦The Michigan State Police Study
◦A Study of the Effects of 5 Hours’ Exposure to Pornography
◦Senate Committee Research: Images and Crime
◦Linda Lovelace & Coercion
◦Horrific Video Games: Custers Last Stand, Auschwitz, Night Trap
◦Increasing Crime and Suicide Rates:
■Crime Rates
■Homicide
■Rape
■Youth Suicide
•See also:
◦Fallacies and Urban Myths – Page 1
◦Studies and Research Findings about media effects etc.
Martin Bryant & 2000 Violent Videos
Everyone “knows” Martin Bryant owned about 2000 violent videos because that was widely reported in the media. Unfortunately, the truth received far less coverage.
“…while 65 per cent of the population believed television violence influenced violent behaviour, there was no empirical evidence of this, Mr Dickie [Australia’s chief censor] told the country’s most senior judges at the annual conference of Supreme Court judges in Brisbane… He attacked the media for playing a role in the misconception that television violence was to blame for violent behaviour. He said that while the community was seeking answers in the wake of the massacre at Port Arthur, there was some ‘drivel’ in newspapers that the killer, Martin Bryant, had a collection of 2000 violent and pornographic videos.
A check with the Department of Justice in Tasmania revealed these videos were a collection of period musicals, romances and dramas which belonged to the woman who had previously owned the house.”
Source: The Australian, 30 Jan 1997. [Similar report in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 Jun 96]Ted Bundy & Pornography Made Me Do It
Politicians must know the facts, right? On SBS TV’s Insight, 17 April 1997, John Bradford, then Federal Member for McPherson on the Gold Coast and a founder of the Coalition’s conservative Christian based Lyons Forum, said:
“…I think there is a strong connection between what people see and what they do, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, there’s a lot of evidence of the fact that people who’ve committed mass murders have been watching violent videos and people who’ve committed rape have been watching pornography – now that may by no means be everybody that’s influenced that way but the fact is that some people are and that in my view is a very persuasive argument why those lines need to be drawn at a point where those sort of materials are not available generally to people to view…”
He later attempted to back up his opinion by referring to the case of Ted Bundy:
“…the famous Bundy case, the man that was executed after he raped and killed a number of young women – when he was interviewed before he went to the gas chamber he made the very point that he started on soft porn and as it went he went on he needed a bigger and bigger buzz and so he went to hard porn and then he went beyond that to actually raping young women…”
However, little credence can be given to the claims of criminals facing the electric chair. As Paul Wilson, former Research Director at the Australian Institute of Criminology, points out:
“In Ted Bundy’s case, no serious social scientist or law enforcement officer takes the explanation that ‘pornography made me do it’ seriously. Well before Bundy turned the pages of a sexually explicit magazine or watched an adult video he was exhibiting bizarre behaviour. Dr Dorothy Lewis, who conducted multiple interviews with the killer just after his arrest, reported that Bundy was a highly disturbed child at the age of three. When Bundy was first arrested in 1978, early interviews with police and psychiatrists reveal that the killer referred to popular sexually explicit magazines as ‘normal healthy sexual stimuli’. It was only in the 1980s, when a court refused to certify him insane and to save him from the electric chair, that Bundy became a born-again Christian and reiterated the party line on pornography.”
Source: Dealing with Pornography: The Case Against Censorship, Paul Wilson, University of New South Wales Press Ltd, 1995Wilson also refers to reports on Bundy’s childhood when he and his mother were living with his grandfather, an extremely violent man who “generally terrorised everyone he lived with”.
Wade Frankum & American Psycho
During the mid 1990s, Robert Manne, former editor of the conservative monthly magazine, Quadrant, frequently attempted to justify his desire for censorship (of what other people may read, no doubt) with unsupported claims that information causes violent acts:
“In 1991 Wade Frankum went on a murder spree in Sydney, killing seven. The coronial report into this crime showed that Frankum was a sexually disturbed young man who, before his murderous outburst had been an obsessive visitor to local prostitutes and a regular consumer of X-rated videos and pornographic magazines. An open copy of the extremely violent misogynist fantasy American Psycho was found on his bedside table. The psychiatrist who assisted the coroner thought that Frankum’s exposure to ‘detailed descriptions of sexual murders and tortures’ in American Psycho and elsewhere may have ‘tipped the balance’ in his case.”
Source: “Liberals deny the video link”, The Australian, 6 January 1997However, McKenzie Wark’s response highlights the flaw in such claims:
“I was surprised that Robert Manne would risk his reputation by repeating some of the half truths and one-and-a-half truths on violence and the media popular with the lunar right. Manne claims that there is ‘evidence’ to suggest a ‘link’ between ‘a diet of pornography or extreme depicted violence and the commission of crime’. He doesn’t want to put it any more strongly than a ‘link’, but this is already a rhetorical sleight of hand that steps beyond the facts.
Manne’s ‘evidence’ includes an FBI study that claims pornography ‘played a major part’ in the lives and the crimes of 29 of the 36 serial killers they studied.’ Did you spot the logical flaw, dear reader? The coincidence of porn and crime is turned into a ‘link’, which implies some kind of causal connection — no evidence for which is offered at all.”
Source: “Violence link is a distorted view”, The Australian, 8 January 1996Those who claim that exposure to pornography causes sexual abuse should give close thought to the fact that, in so doing, they offer criminals a 21st Century excuse to support pleas for leniency, regardless of the fact that sexual abuse has been occurring since long before the invention of the camera.
The Michigan State Police Study & Pornography
Robert Manne, former editor of the conservative monthly magazine, Quadrant, claimed the following as evidence of the harmful effects of pornography and need for censorship:
“According to one study conducted by Chicago police, virtually everyone convicted of paedophile sexual acts was a consumer of pornography. According to another study, conducted by the FBI, pornography played a major part in the lives and the crimes of 29 of the 36 serial killers they studied. According to yet another study, conducted this time by the police in Michigan, of 35,000 sexual offenders 41 per cent had used pornography prior to or during their criminal act.”
Source: “Liberals deny the video link”, Robert Manne, The Australian, 6 January 1997However, all of Mr Manne’s “evidence” becomes questionable in view of the following:
Paul Wilson, Dean of Humanities and Social Science at Bond University and former Research Director at the Australian Institute of Criminology, writes:
“Many of those who have campaigned against pornography…were fond of quoting from a report allegedly produced by the Michigan State Police Force’s Sexual Crime Unit in the 1980s. The report was said to have stated that there was link found between the use of pornography and the commission of sex crimes.
In 1992 the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) asked for a copy of this report. Detective-Sergeant David Minsk wrote back saying that no such report existed. The criminal profiler for the Michigan State Police, Minsk confirmed that his department maintained the largest computerised sex-motivated crime file in the world. It was initiated in 1955 and continues to the present, with almost 75000 cases on file. As a result of requests from around the world concerning the report alleging a link between pornography and crime, Minsk attempted to ‘replicate’ such a study using the information that he had on computer. ‘There are insufficient data,’ he wrote, ‘to indicate anything other than a weak correlation between pornography and sexual assault, and even less information to suggest that pornography was used prior to or during sexual assault’.”
Source: Dealing with Pornography: The Case Against Censorship, Paul Wilson, University of New South Wales Press Ltd, 1995A copy of the letter from the Michigan State Police to the Acquisitions Librarian at the AIC’s J.V. Barry Library was tabled in the Australian Senate and incorporated in Senate Hansard on 20 August 1992.
Robert Swan, in a letter to the Editor of The Australian, published 9 January 97, writes:
“On December 2, 1991, the head of the Michigan State Police Investigative Resources Unit into Violent Crime, Detective Sergeant David Minzey, made a public statement about this research, saying, ‘The truth is that no such study was ever conducted.’ He went on to say that, ‘As the criminal personality profiler for the Michigan State Police I can offer that pornography is used to enhance sexual fantasy and for arousal. That this material would cause one to work themselves up into a frenzy and then commit a sexual assault would be a giant leap indeed. In fact, one of the most popular magazines in prison amongst child molesters is the J.C. Penny catalogue [retail store] because it features young boys and girls in their underwear. I believe that the person who presented this study had a religious agenda…I hope this answers any questions you might have had on our non-existent study.’ ”
It is well to remember the Michigan State Police, their non-existent study crops up time and time again.
A Study of the Effects of 5 Hours’ Exposure to Pornography
During the late 1990s, Susan Bastick, then National Spokesperson for the Australian Family Association, was fond of citing a six week college study, for example:
“…If you look at the evidence when you’re looking at what non violent erotica is, it’s normally women in degraded positions, and the evidence shows, a college study, people never having seen pornography before, 5 hours across a period of 6 weeks, regarded rape as less serious than they did before, they lost their respect for women, they lost the dignity that women should have if they are to be protected in society. We wouldn’t allow racist images because it leads to a loss of respect, a loss of dignity, the start of violence, we shouldn’t allow these images of women for exactly the same reason.”
Source: ABC TV’s Lateline, 1 April 1997Whilst Ms Bastick did not bother to identify this “college study”, there is little doubt that she was referring to Zillman and Bryant’s research. This study is discussed in Senator Helen Coonan’s paper “Censorship Revisited” of April 1997:
“The original findings were formulated from the surveyed responses of eighty male and eighty female undergraduate university students who had been exposed to varying degrees of non violent sexually explicit videos for a period of six weeks. The greatest exposure endured by respondents over the test period was four hours and 48 minutes. In one scenario, the students were asked to act as jurors and recommend a prison sentence for the offender in a specific rape case from which conclusions were drawn regarding attitudes to rape and sexual callousness toward women.
Before the conclusions are generalised assuming universal application, some aspects of the research warrant scrutiny. The following issues are unclear from the published data:
•to what extent ‘controlled experimental conditions’ were maintained and whether the exclusion of a benchmark viewing time of porn for undergraduate university students detracted from the methodology;
•whether the length of a recommended prison term in a specific rape case was indicative of disapproval and condemnation of rape or merely cognisant of the circumstances in that particular case;
•whether conclusions about sexual callousness and the trivialisation of rape can be satisfactorily drawn from the frequency of students recommending relatively lenient sentences involving short terms of incarceration; and
•whether the failure to find a significant gender bias in the alleged connection between pornography and rape with both men and women tested recommending shorter prison sentences detracts from its overall value.”
Senate Committee Research: Images and Crime
Former Federal Member for McPherson on the Gold Coast, and a founder of the Coalition’s conservative Christian based Lyons Forum, John Bradford claimed:
“…the Senate Committee had plenty of evidence that there was a strong causal connection, now I mean you can argue that it’s inconclusive but in my view it was conclusive both in respect of violent material and I think sexually explicit material.”
Source: SBS TV’s Insight, 17 April 1997However, the Committee did not, in fact, agree with Mr Bradford’s view that the evidence was conclusive. They state:
“Rather that concentrating on a largely inconclusive cause and effect debate, the Senate Committee’s view is that action should be taken on the basis of consensus amongst researchers that there are possible adverse effects from watching violence and that children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable…”
Source: “Report on the Portrayal of Violence in the Electronic Media”, Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Electronic Technologies, February 1997, Page 18Furthermore, Dr Adam Graycar, as Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, advised a public seminar (convened by the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Electronic Technologies) on 29 November 1996, that:
“For over 50 years there has been a lot of research examining the relationship between violence in the entertainment media and acts of violence or aggression. You all have before you a very short paper entitled, The portrayal of violence in the media, which we have put out…we reviewed an enormous amount of literature. Essentially we found that you can find something in the literature to back up any point of view you want. They are all rigorous studies; they are all very carefully done.”
Additionally, Recommendations of the Senate Committee include:
“The Committee recommends also that State and Territory Ministers consider proposals to require that all R-rated violent videos carry a label indicating that the content of such videos might be harmful to the mental wellbeing of children and those adults suffering from depression and other mental disorders.”
Given the Senate Committee’s well-deserved reputation for censoriousness, there is no doubt that, had they found conclusive evidence, they most certainly would not have used the phrase “might be harmful” in their recommendations.
Linda Lovelace & Coercion
Claims have been made by the pro-censorship lobby in Australia that Linda Lovelace was coerced into participating in the production of “Deep Throat”. However, that may not necessarily be factual. Paul Wilson writes:
“Much was made of the fact that Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, alleged that she was physically coerced into pornographic performances. It is significant to note that Ms Lovelace became a born-again Christian just before she said that her husband had forced her into performing. Her co-star in the infamous movie threw some doubt on the veracity of Ms Lovelace’s confession when he said that she was not coerced and that her husband was hardly ever seen on the film set.”
Source: Dealing with Pornography: The Case Against Censorship, Paul Wilson, University of New South Wales Press Ltd, 1995Horrific Video Games: Custers Last Stand, Auschwitz, Night Trap
In late 1992 and early 1993, there were reports that three horrifically violent and incredibly depraved video games were poised to hit the Australian teenage market. They were Auschwitz, a game in which the objective was claimed to be to cram as many Jews as possible into a gas chamber; Custer’s Last Stand, claimed to include white soldiers raping and torturing Native American Women; and Night Trap, in which the objective was claimed to be to stalk, torture, rape and murder five women.
Of course, there was immediate public uproar which fuelled the concerns of the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards (whose recommendations resulted in censorship legislation which bans the sale of games – including to adults – which are deemed unsuitable for persons under 18 years of age.)
Catharine Lumby, in her book Bad Girls: the media, sex & feminism in the 90s (Allen & Unwin 1997), states:
“According to the then editor of the Sydney Morning Herald’s computer section, Gareth Powell, Auschwitz and Custer’s Last Stand are ‘definitely urban myths’. In a column published in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, he wrote that he’d spent ‘a considerable amount of time and money checking 400 newspapers and magazines worldwide for real [commercially produced] versions of these games’ and had ‘scoured the electronic bulletin boards of the world’. He also offered to donate $100 to charity if any reader could produce evidence either game existed. No-one came forward with conclusive evidence.
Certainly, the two major retailers of video games in Australia, Sega and Nintendo – who between them control almost 100 per cent of the world market – do not make or market the games. Marketing manager of Nintendo at the time Mike Pelman told [Ms Lumby] in an interview for [her] book that: ‘I’ve never seen the games and we’re very much in touch with products in the market. They are certainly not being sold as packaged cartridge games and standard retailers wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. If they do exist at all, they’ve been put out by a backyard operator on floppy disk and retailers don’t want to deal with that sort of product’.
A game manufactured by Sega entitled Night Trap does exist, but … the player is encouraged to save the people in the house [from aliens] – not stalk, torture or rape them.”
(Note: There was apparently a game called Custers Revenge produced and available for the Atari 2600 system in the early 1980s. That may or may not have some connection with claims that a game titled Custer’s Last Stand was allegedly poised to hit the Australian market in 1992/93.)
Increasing Crime and Suicide Rates
A considerable number of media reports suggest that crime and suicide rates are increasing. When considering the claims of the pro-censorship lobby that viewing images and reading information ‘must’ be the cause, it is relevant to consider whether rates are actually increasing:
Crime Trends
Perception of crime trends, Crime Facts Info No. 120, Australian Institute of Criminology, 12 Apr 2006.
“The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) is a survey of 4270 Australians, first carried out by the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research in 2003. One of the questions asked by AuSSA in 2003 was whether respondents believed crime had increased, decreased or stayed the same over the past two years. As can be seen in the chart below, belief that crime had increased either a little or a lot was most common.
…
These findings are at odds with actual crime trends as the overall pattern in recent years is one of decreasing crime. According to the International Crime Victimisation Survey, crime victimisation rates in Australia declined between 2000 and 2004, from 24 percent to 17 percent. In addition, recorded property crime rates declined from 2001 to 2004 for most major categories of offence (AIC 2006).”
Homicide
Drop in homicide in Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology, Media Release No. 7/05, 5 Oct 2005.
“The number of homicides recorded by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2003-2004 is the lowest since records began in 1989, the Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, Dr Makkai said today. It decreased by six per cent over the previous year.
Dr Makkai today released the latest report from the Australian Institute of Criminology ‘Homicide in Australia: 2003-2004 National homicide monitoring program (NHMP) annual report’, which presents data on all incidents, victims and offenders of homicide in Australia.”
Constant rates of homicide victimisation in Australia, Crime Facts Info No. 3, Australian Institute of Criminology, 17 Jul 2001.
“In 2000 the Northern Territory recorded its lowest homicide victimisation rate (3.06 per 100,000 people) since 1989. A Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice paper, “Homicide in Australia 1999–2000” provides a statistical snapshot of police recorded homicides in the last year, as well as information on trends over the last 11 years and jurisdictional comparisons. Trends show that the homicide rate for Australia has stayed remarkably constant. The highest rate recorded over the last 11 years was 2 per 100,000 and the lowest rate was 1.7 per 100,000. These data come from the National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP), which was established by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 1990 and has recorded every case of homicide in Australia since 1989.”
Australian Institute of Criminology researcher, Marianne James:
“said the statistics she had collected while at the Canberra-based institute, while yet to be analysed, showed that the level of murder in Australia, 1.9 persons per every 100,000 people, had changed little since 1915.
‘As the number of young males increases so does the homicide rate,’ Ms James said.
Where there was a decrease in the number of young men in the population, such as during World War II, there was a corresponding fall in the number of murders.
Where there was an increase in the population such as the coming of age of baby boomers in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a corresponding increase in the murder rate.”
Source: Brisbane Courier Mail, 5 March 1997Rape
“30 years ago, if you got raped, you didn’t tell anyone. Today, people are aware of rape, they talk about it, sometimes the police even take reports seriously, and in some countries marital rape is actually treated as a serious crime. Maybe pornography even has something to do with that – is it really any accident that a higher percentage of victims are likely to report rape in countries where hardcore is most widely available? We read sexual material, sex is part of the public discourse, and now we actually say out loud the things we all hid in secret before, and one of them is the fact of violence against women.
Do you feel more frightened because there’s more violence, or do you just feel more endangered because you know about it? We keep hearing of rising rape rates, but is it the number of rapes that is going up, or just the percentage who report? And when people quote numbers to you, are they really bigger than previous numbers, or do they just sound bad because you didn’t know how bad it really was? Last year when I was in the States, an anti-porn activist attempted to shock me with the ‘rising’ frequency of rape by telling me that ‘there’s a rape reported every six minutes in the United States’. ‘Really? Are you sure that number is correct?’ She was, and she quoted all sorts of reports to prove it. The problem with this statistic is that in 1977 the frequency of reported forcible rape in the US was one every three minutes – twice the new, ‘higher’ rate.”
Source: Fake Science And Pornography, Avedon Carol, Feminists Against Censorship, UK, 1993Trends in recorded sexual assault, Crime Facts Info No. 105, Australian Institute of Criminology, 30 Aug 2005.
“According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Recorded crime – victims annual publication, the rate of reported sexual assault has increased in the period 1993-2003. In 1993 the rate was 69 recorded victims of sexual assault per 100,000 population; by 2003 the rate had steadily climbed to 92 reported victims per 100,000 persons. This increase does not necessarily reflect an increase in the prevalence of sexual assault, but is likely to be influenced by an increase in reporting incidents to police. Victimisation surveys such as the ABS National Crime and Safety Survey and the Australian component of the International Violence Against Women Survey suggest that between 12 and 20 per cent of sexual assaults against women are reported to police – a reporting rate lower than for other major crime categories. In 2003, the last year for which ABS data are available, 82 per cent of recorded sexual assault victims were female.”
4523.0 – Sexual Assault in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 2004 [PDF 1894 Kb], Australian Bureau of Statistics, issued 7 September 2004:
“Recorded Crime Statistics
Both numbers and victimisation rates of sexual assault in recorded crime statistics in Australia have increased in recent years. The overall recorded victimisation prevalence rates have risen by about one-third in ten years, from 0.07% (69.0 per 100,000 persons) in 1993 to 0.09% (91.7 per 100,000) in 2003. (See Graph 2.9 below.)
…
These changes in recorded crime statistics need to be read with caution. The changes could be attributed to a number of factors, such as changes in the propensity of victims to identify their experiences as crimes, changes in the propensity to report sexual assault to police, changes in police recording practices, or a combination of these factors. Changes in the data therefore may not necessarily reflect actual changes in the underlying numbers or rates of incidents.”
For further information, see Measuring violence against women: a review of the literature and statistics, E-Brief prepared by the Australian Parliamentary Library, issued 6 December 2004.
Youth suicide
“…Channel 9 News reported that 2000 teenagers committed suicide last year. For the record, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 350 males and 84 females aged between 15 and 24 took their own lives in 1995, accounting for 23% of deaths in this age group.
There is little to explain late 20th century trends in youth suicide, although the Taskforce would do well to look to the apparent rise in depression and substance abuse in the young, both commonly found in those who have committed suicide.
Such changes have, in turn, been linked to social adversity arising from high youth unemployment and greater competition for scarce educational and training resources.
It would be a refreshing change, if the electronic media would focus on these issues, rather than misleading the community and causing even greater alarm.”
Source: Dr Michael Carr-Gregg Head Education Unit Centre for Adolescent Health, University of Melbourne, Letter to Editor, Melbourne Age, 3 Jan 1997Social factors in suicide in Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology, Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice No. 52, February 1996.
“This paper highlights the increasing occurrence of suicide in Australia, particularly among young adult and adolescent males. It examines the trends for both males and females and considers the role of selected social factors in suicide. The need for better suicide prevention programs, which focus both at the primary level of prevention and at the postvention level, is addressed.”
Internet, Porn, and Cybersex Addictions:
Symptoms, Self-help, and Tips for Parents
The Internet is a wonderful tool for communication. However, it can become an escape from reality that has the appearance of safety, intimacy and anonymity. Use of the Internet for games, gambling, messages, porn or cybersex can become as addictive as any other drug.
What is Internet or Computer Addiction?
- A student has difficulty getting his/her homework done because computer games occupy all after-school time.
- Someone connects to the Internet at 9:00pm and suddenly discovers it is dawn and he/she has not left the computer.
- A wife is distraught because her husband has replaced their sexual relationship with Internet porn and online sex.
Searching for information, skimming news headlines, downloading your favorite songs, or placing bids on eBay … the options are endless. We all enjoy the benefits of the Internet. But at what point does frequent online activity become too frequent and become a source of significant problems in someone’s life? Internet addiction is generally defined as spending so much time online that Internet use adversely affects marriages, family and social life, work, and psychological and physical well-being.
Signs and symptoms of Internet or Computer Addiction
As with any other addiction, a computer addict is likely to have several of the experiences and feelings on the list below. How many of them describe you or someone close to you?
- Have mixed feelings of well-being and guilt while at the computer.
- Lose control of time while on the computer; want to quit or cut down, but are unable to.
- Neglect friends, family and/or responsibilities in order to be online.
- Lie to your boss and family about the amount of time spent on the computer and what you do while on it.
- Feel anxious, depressed, or irritable when your computer time is shortened or interrupted.
- Use the computer repeatedly as an outlet when sad, upset, or for sexual gratification.
- Develop problems in school or on the job as a result of the time spent and the type of activities accessed on the computer.
- Have financial problems due to on-line purchases or gambling.
- Become tempted to get involved in relationships with strangers, which may put you at risk for victimization or jeopardize your safety.
Health effects associated with computer addiction
Being addicted to the computer also can cause physical discomfort or medical problems:
- Carpal Tunnel syndrome (pain, numbness, and burning in your hands that can radiate up the wrists, elbows, and shoulders)
- Dry eyes
- Backaches
- Severe headaches
- Eating irregularities, such as skipping meals
- Failure to attend to personal hygiene
- Sleep disturbances
Who is most at risk for internet addiction?
According to the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, Internet addiction affects people of varying ages, cultural backgrounds, occupations, and educational levels. The following problems are likely triggers for internet addiction:
|
Triggers for Internet Addiction
|
|
Substance Abuse
|
Mental Illness
|
Relationship Troubles
|
|
Over half of Internet addicts suffer from other addictions, mainly to drugs, alcohol, smoking, and sex.
|
Trends show that Internet addicts suffer from emotional problems such as depression and anxiety-related disorders and often use the fantasy world of the Internet to psychologically escape unpleasant feelings or stressful situations.
|
In almost 75% of cases, Internet addicts use applications such as chat rooms, instant messaging, or online gaming as a safe way of establishing new relationships and more confidently relating to others.
|
Breaking addiction to the Internet
The first step is recognizing that there is a problem.
Overcoming denial should be followed by other treatment steps, including:
- Identifying specific problem areas
- Generating a behavior modification plan, such as setting a timer for usage, planning a daily schedule, keeping a log of moods when going online, matching time spent online with time spent socializing face-to-face and taking part in non-computer related activities
- Focusing on other areas for needed skill enhancement, such as problem solving, assertiveness, social skills, overcoming shyness, anger control
- Assessing for other disorders like depression or anxiety that may need medical treatment.
- Assistance in locating or forming a support group for other people who are trying to regain control over their computer use.
If you suspect you are addicted to the Web, consult a therapist in your area, preferably one who specializes in addiction. In addition, you might join a support group. One online group can be found at the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery.
How can I help computer-obsessed friends?
- Be a good role model. Manage the computer use in your own life well
- Introduce them to some other people who are fun, interesting, and who handle their computer use sensibly.
- Get them involved in some non-computer related fun.
- Support their desire for change if they think they have a problem.
- Encourage them to seek professional counseling.
What are some tips for parents dealing with Internet addiction?
If your child shows signs of Internet addiction, there are many things that you as a parent can do to help. See the table below for tips on dealing with the problem:
|
Helping a Child with Internet Addiction
|
| Encourage other interests |
Get your child out from behind the computer screen. Expose kids to other hobbies and activities, including sports, music, art, and educational or cultural pastimes. Take your kid to a ball game or a play, sign up for swimming lessons or a ceramics class, visit your local library or a museum. |
| Encourage social activities |
Excessive computer use can be isolating. Help your child reconnect with other children and make new friends. Options include team sports, the Boy or Girl Scouts, and afterschool clubs. |
| Set clear limits and rules |
Establish rules about when and for how long your child can surf online. Limit the amount of Internet time your child is allowed each day, and restrict Internet use until homework and chores are done. |
| Monitor computer use |
Make sure the computer is in a common area of the house where you can keep an eye on your child’s online activity. While personal supervision is essential, parental control software can be a useful supplementary tool. |
| Be a good role model |
Your child looks to you as an example. Make sure your own computer use is not out of control. It will be difficult to enforce Internet rules if your child sees you breaking them. |
| Seek professional counseling |
If your child has an Internet addiction, it may indicate a deeper problem such as anxiety or depression. If symptoms are severe or you’re concerned about your child’s emotional state, schedule an appointment with a mental health professional. |
For more advice on dealing with Internet addiction and keeping your child safe, see Web Aware: Tips for Parents and Rules ‘N Tools.
Internet Pornography and Cybersex
What strategies do online porn sites use to trap and hold viewers?
While offensive and distasteful to many users, most Internet porn is not illegal. Countries have different cultural standards and legislation regarding sexual material, and content that is banned in one jurisdiction may be easily accessible on servers in another.
For parents, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Internet is the easy access it gives kids to porn. Hard-core sexual images, which were once very difficult to acquire, are now just a mouse click away. Teens, particularly adolescent males, have always been driven by natural curiosity to seek out pornography. This hasn’t changed. What’s different is the easy access the Internet gives kids to deviant or violent sexual content, which may have an influence on their developing attitudes towards sexuality and relationships.
The online porn industry uses many strategies to promote use of their sites, including:
- Pop-up windows: trap users in an endless loop of porn.
- Home page hijacking: (planting a Java script command on computers to change the user’s default home page to a porn site). Changing the home page back to its original setting appears to solve the problem until the computer is rebooted; then the offensive site re-appears as the home page.
- Stealth sites: a variety of techniques, including buying up expired domain names, exploiting common misspellings, or using well-known names of companies or artists.
- Hidden key words that are picked up by search engines: Porn operators bury key words, including brand names of popular toys or names of pop artists, in the code of their Web sites to lead children and teens to their sites.
What are some tips for dealing with online pornography?
For children and teens:
There are many steps you can take to safeguard your children and teenagers from pornography on the Internet. First, your family should establish rules regarding Internet use. It can be helpful to create an online agreement. Here is a Family Internet Safety Contract you can print out or use as a guide.
It is also important to discuss the dangers of pornography with your children and teenagers. They should be warned about sexual predators and taught how to protect themselves from exploitation. In the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s A Parent’s Guide to Internet Safety, parents are recommended to teach their children the following safety rules:
- Never arrange a face-to-face meeting with someone you meet online.
- Never upload pictures of yourself onto the Internet to people you don’t personally know.
- Never give out identifying information such as your name, home address, school name, or telephone number.
- Never download pictures from an unknown source, as there is a good chance there could be sexually explicit images.
- Never respond to messages or bulletin board postings that are suggestive, obscene, belligerent, or harassing.
- Whatever you are told online may or may not be true.
For more advice on dealing with online pornography, see the table below.
|
Protecting your Child or Teen from Internet Pornography and Victimization
|
- Talk to your child or teenager about sexual victimization and potential on-line danger.
- Spend time with your children online. Have them teach you about their favorite web sites and teach them about the responsible use of online resources.
- Keep the computer in a common room in the house, not in your child’s bedroom.
- Utilize parental controls provided by your service provider and/or blocking software.
- Monitor your child’s use of chat rooms. Chat rooms are often prowled by sex offenders.
- Maintain access to your child’s online account and randomly check his/her e-mail. Be up front with your child about your access and the reasons why.
- Find out what computer safeguards are utilized by your child’s school, the public library, and at the homes of your child’s friends.
- Understand, even if your child or teen was a willing participant in any form of sexual exploitation, that he/she is not at fault and is the victim. The offender always bears the complete responsibility for his or her actions.
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation |
For more advice, visit Web Aware’s Pornography: Tips for Parents. To learn how to monitor your child’s Internet use, see Tracking Where Kids Have Been Online.
For adults:
Pornography becomes an obsessive relationship with fantasy objects. Because real people cannot compete with fantasy, pornography ultimately interferes with—and may even replace—genuine relationships. Cybersex involves online chat rooms and online sexual encounters, and generally includes several aspects of pornography.
Two online questionnaires can help you more objectively assess your addiction to internet porn or to cybersex:
- Porn Addiction Questionnaire (from Self Help: Overcoming Pornography Addiction)
- Cybersex Addiction Questionnaire (Rob Weiss, M.A., from the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health)
Once you have broken through your denial about your addiction, you will need help in overcoming the addiction, and in developing healthier patterns of relating to the “real” people in your life. Many useful suggestions for overcoming Internet addiction, as well as internet porn and cybersex addictions, can be found on college counseling sites, such as Texas State.
The self-help 12-Step programs Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) and Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) specialize in recovery from cybersex or Internet porn addiction. To find an SAA or SLAA meeting near you, go to their meeting locators.
What is Internet addiction?
|
|
|
|
Internet Addiction is an impulsive-control problem and five subtypes have been defined:
- Cybersexual Addiction – Individuals who suffer from Cybersex/Internet pornography addiction are typically engaged in viewing, downloading, and trading online pornography or involved in adult fantasy role-play chat rooms.
- Cyber-Relational Addiction – Individuals who suffer from an addiction to chat rooms, IM, or social networking sites become over-involved in online relationships or may engage in virtual adultery. Online friends quickly become more important to the individual often at the expense of real life relationships with family and friends. In many instances, this will lead to marital discord and family instability.
- Net Compulsions – Addictions to online gaming, online gambling, and eBay are fast becoming new mental problems in the post-Internet Era. With the instant access to virtual casinos, interactive games, and eBay, addicts loose excessive amounts of money and even disrupt other job-related duties or significant relationships.
- Information Overload – The wealth of data available on the World Wide Web has created a new type of compulsive behavior regarding excessive web surfing and database searches. Individuals will spend greater amounts of time searching and collecting data from the web and organizing information. Obsessive compulsive tendencies and reduced work productivity are typically associated with this behavior.
- Computer Addiction – In the 80s, computer games such as Solitaire and Minesweeper were programmed into computers and researchers found that obsessive computer game playing became problematic in organizational settings as employees spent most days playing rather than working. These games are not interactive nor played online.
Based upon the DSM, Dr. Kimberly Young developed eight criteria to diagnose Internet addiction:
- Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet (think about previous online activity or anticipate next online session)?
- Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction?
- Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use?
- Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?
- Do you stay on-line longer than originally intended?
- Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the Internet?
- Have you lied to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet?
- Do you use the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g., feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)?
Answering “yes” to five or more questions may mean you suffer from Internet addiction over a six month period and when not better accounted for by a manic episode. Internet addiction is a global problem and according to studies at the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery:
- 71% of office workers abuse the Internet during work hours visiting social networking sites, shopping online, reading personal email, or visiting pornography, gaming, or gambling sites.
- Individuals who suffer from depression, anxiety-disorders, social phobia, and other compulsive disorders are more likely to develop Internet addiction.
- Cybersex addiction, online affairs, and online gaming are the most common forms of Internet addiction.
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most effective form of treatment for Internet addiction.
- Internet predators are twice as likely to suffer from Internet addiction.
- Children who suffer from Internet addiction are more likely to suffer from depression, experience academic and social problems at school, and are at greater risk to develop physical illnesses, obesity, and carpel tunnel syndrome.
According to the Stanford University School of Medicine Study, 1 out of 8 Americans suffer from Internet Addiction, 14% of respondents found it hard to abstain from Internet use for several days; 5.9% said excessive Internet use affected their relationships; 8.2% said the Internet was a means of escape from the real world.
According to the Chinese Government, approximately 13 % of Chinese teenagers suffer from Internet addiction and they have banned the opening of Internet cafes for the year 2007.
The Government of China funded a military-style boot camp to combat the disease. Patients are males between 14 and 19 years old. This China boot camp reports a 70% recovery rate and over 1,500 young who have received treatment at this facility operating since 2004.
In Germany, estimates suggest that close to 1 million people are addicted to the Internet, or about 3 percent of the German online population. In 2003, the German social security services instituted the first camp in the seaside town of Boltenhagen, northern Germany. It is the first camp of its kind in Europe and aims to wean children off computers.
In Amsterdam, the first Detoxification Center to treat video game addiction opened in 2006.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai adopted a measure to cut the students’ use of Internet in the school dormitories after the suicide of an IIT student in October of 2005 due to Internet abuse. |
|
Internet Addiction Guide
John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
February 2, 1999
Last revised: April 16, 2005
A resource for objective, useful information
about Internet addiction, a theorized disorder.
Is the Internet Addiction Test valid?
What is Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD)?
What “Internet addiction disorder” (IAD) is still difficult to define at this time. Much of the original research was based upon the weakest type of research methodology, namely exploratory surveys with no clear hypothesis or rationale backing them. Coming from an atheoretical approach has some benefits, but also is not typically recognized as being a strong way to approach a new disorder. More recent research has expanded upon the original surveys and anecdotal case study reports. However, as I will illustrate below later, even these studies don’t support the conclusions the authors claim.
The original research into this disorder began with exploratory surveys, which cannot establish causal relationships between specific behaviors and their cause. While surveys can help establish descriptions of how people feel about themselves and their behaviors, they cannot draw conclusions about whether a specific technology, such as the Internet, has actually caused those behaviors. Those conclusions that are drawn are purely speculative and subjective made by the researchers themselves. Researchers have a name for this logical fallacy, ignoring a common cause. It’s one of the oldest fallacies in science, and one still regularly perpetrated in psychological research today.
Do some people have problems with spending too much time online? Sure they do. Some people also spend too much time reading, watching television, and working, and ignore family, friendships, and social activities. But do we have TV addiction disorder, book addiction, and work addiction being suggested as legitimate mental disorders in the same category as schizophrenia and depression? I think not. It’s the tendency of some mental health professionals and researchers to want to label everything they see as potentially harmful with a new diagnostic category. Unfortunately, this causes more harm than it helps people. (The road to “discovering” IAD is filled with many logical fallacies, not the least of which is the confusion between cause and effect.)
What most people online who think they are addicted are probably suffering from is the desire to not want to deal with other problems in their lives. Those problems may be a mental disorder (depression, anxiety, etc.), a serious health problem or disability, or a relationship problem. It is no different than turning on the TV so you won’t have to talk to your spouse, or going “out with the boys” for a few drinks so you don’t have to spend time at home. Nothing is different except the modality.
What some very few people who spend time online without any other problems present may suffer from is compulsive over-use. Compulsive behaviors, however, are already covered by existing diagnostic categories and treatment would be similar. It’s not the technology (whether it be the Internet, a book, the telephone, or the television) that is important or addicting — it’s the behavior. And behaviors are easily treatable by traditional cognitive-behavior techniques in psychotherapy.
Case studies, the alternative to surveys used for many conclusions drawn about online overuse, are just as problematic. How can we really draw any reasonable conclusions about millions of people online based upon one or two case studies? Yet media stories, and some researchers, covering this issue usually use a case study to help “illustrate” the problem. All a case study does is influence our emotional reactions to the issue; it does nothing to help us further understand the actual problem and the many potential explanations for it. Case studies on an issue like this are usually a red flag that help frame the issue in an emotional light, leaving hard, scientific data out of the picture. It is a common diversionary tactic.
There is more research that needs to be critically examined here, which I will provide descriptive analyses of shortly.
Why Does the Research Leave Something to Be Desired?
Well, the obvious answer is that many of the original researchers into the phenomenon known as IAD were actually clinicians who decided to conduct a survey. Usually doctoral training is sufficient to create and test a survey, yet the psychometric properties of these surveys are never released. (Perhaps because they were never conducted in the first place? We simply do not know.)
The obvious confounds are never controlled for in most of these surveys. Questions about pre-existing or a history of mental disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety), health problems or disabilities, or relationship problems are absent from these surveys. Since this is one of the most obvious alternative explanations for some of the data being obtained (for example, see Storm King’s article, Is the Internet Addictive, or Are Addicts Using the Internet? below), it is very surprising these questions are left off. It taints all the data and make the data virtually useless.
Other factors are simply not controlled for. The current Internet population is nearly 50/50 in terms of proportion of men to women. Yet people are still drawing conclusions about this same group of people based upon survey samples that have 70-80% men, comprised mostly of white Americans. Researchers barely mention these discrepancies, all of which will again skew the results.
Research done in a particular area should also agree about certain very basic things after a time. Years have gone by and there are more than a few studies out there looking at Internet addiction. Yet none of them agree on a single definition for this problem, and all of them vary widely in their reported results of how much time an “addict” spends online. If they can’t even get these basics down, it is not surprising the research quality still suffers.
More research has been done since the original surveys were released in 1996. This newer research has been conducted by more independent researchers with clearer hypotheses and stronger, less biased population sets. More about these studies will be discussed in updates to this article.
Where Did It Come From?
Good question. It came from, believe it or not, the criteria for pathological gambling, a single, anti-social behavior that has very little social redeeming value. Researchers in this area believe they can simply copy this criteria and apply it to the hundreds of behaviors carried out everyday on the Internet, a largely pro-social, interactive, and information-driven medium. Do these two dissimilar areas have much in common beyond their face value? I don’t see it.
I don’t know of any other disorder currently being researched where the researchers, showing all the originality of a trash romance novel writer, simply “borrowed” the diagnostic symptom criteria for an unrelated disorder, made a few changes, and declared the existence of a new disorder. If this sounds absurd, it’s because it is.
And this speaks to the larger problem these researchers grapple with… Most have no theory driving their assumptions (see Walther, 1999 for a further discussion of this issue). They see a client in pain (and in fact, I’ve sat in many presentations by these clinicians where they start it off with just such an example), and figure, “Hey, the Internet caused this pain. I’m going to go out and study what makes this possible on the Internet.” There’s no theory (well, sometimes there’s theory after-the-fact), and while some quasi-theoretical explanations are slowly emerging, it is putting the chicken far before the egg.
Do You Spend Too Much Time Online?
In relation to what or whom? Time alone cannot be an indicator of being addicted or engaging in compulsive behavior. Time must be taken in context with other factors, such as whether you’re a college student (who, as a whole, proportionally spend a greater amount of time online), whether it’s a part of your job, whether you have any pre-existing conditions (such as another mental disorder; a person with depression is more likely to spend more time online than someone who doesn’t, for instance, often in a virtual support group environment), whether you have problems or issues in your life which may be causing you to spend more time online (e.g., using it to “get away” from life’s problems, a bad marriage, difficult social relations), etc. So talking about whether you spend too much time online without this important context is useless.
What Makes the Internet So Addictive?
Well, as I have shown above, the research is exploratory at this time, so suppositions such as what makes the Internet so “addictive” are no better than guesses. Since other researchers online have made their guesses known, here are mine.
Since the aspects of the Internet where people are spending the greatest amount of time online have to do with social interactions, it would appear that socialization is what makes the Internet so “addicting.” That’s right — plain old hanging out with other people and talking with them. Whether it’s via e-mail, a discussion forum, chat, or a game online (such as a MUD), people are spending this time exchanging information, support, and chit-chat with other people like themselves.
Would we ever characterize any time spent in the real world with friends as “addicting?” Of course not. Teenagers talk on the phone for hours on end, with people they see everyday! Do we say they are addicted to the telephone? Of course not. People lose hours at a time, immersed in a book, ignoring friends and family, and often not even picking up the phone when it rings. Do we say they are addicted to the book? Of course not. If some clinicians and researchers are now going to start defining addiction as social interactions, then every real-world social relationship I have is an addictive one.
Socializing — talking — is a very “addictive” behavior, if one applies the same criteria to it as researchers looking at Internet addiction do. Does the fact that we’re now socializing with the help of some technology (can you say, “telephone”?) change the basic process of socialization? Perhaps, a bit. But not so significantly as to warrant a disorder. Checking e-mail, as Greenfield claims, is not the same as pulling a slot-machine’s handle. One is social seeking behavior, the other is reward seeking behavior. They are two very different things, as any behaviorist will tell you. It’s too bad the researchers can’t make this differentiation, because it shows a significant lack of understanding of basic behavioral theory.
Alternative Hypotheses
In addition to those previously discussed, here is an alternative hypothesis that no research to date has seriously considered — that the behaviors we are observing are phasic. That is, for most people with “Internet addiction,” they are likely newcomers to the Internet. They are going through the first stage of acclimating themselves to a new environment — by fully immersing themselves in it. Since this environment is so much larger than anything we’ve ever seen before, some people get “stuck” in the acclimation ( or enchantment) stage for a longer period of time than is typical for acclimating to new technologies, products, or services. Walther (1999) made a similar observation based upon the work of Roberts, Smith, and Pollack (1996). The Roberts et al. study found that online chat activity was phasic — people first were enchanted by the activity (characterized by some as obsession), followed by disillusionment with chatting and a decline in usage, and then a balance was reached where the level of chat activity normalized.
I hypothesize that this type of model can be more globally applied to online usage in general:
Some people simply get caught in Stage I and never move beyond it. They may need some help to get to Stage III.
For existing online users, my model allows for overuse as well, since the overuse is defined by finding a new online activity. I would argue, though, that existing users have a much more easier time successfully navigating through these stages for new activities they find online than newcomers to the Internet. It is possible, however, for an existing user to find a new activity (such as an attractive chat room or newsgroup or Website) that could lead them back into this model.
Note one important distinction about my model… It makes the assumption that since all online activity is phasic to some degree, all people will eventually get to Stage III on their own. Just like a teenager learns to not spend hours on the telephone every night on their own (eventually!), most adults online will also learn how to responsibly integrate the Internet into their lives. For some, this integration simply takes longer than others.
What Do I Do If I Think I Have It?
First, don’t panic. Second, just because there is a debate about the validity of this diagnostic category amongst professionals doesn’t mean there isn’t help for it. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, help is readily available for this problem without needing to create all this hoopla about a new diagnosis.
If you have a life problem, or are grappling with a disorder such as depression, seek professional treatment for it. Once you admit and address the problem, other pieces of your life will fall back into place.
Psychologists have studied compulsive behaviors and their treatments for years now, and nearly any well-trained mental health professional will be able to help you learn to slowly curve the time spent online, and address the problems or concerns in your life that may have contributed to your online overuse, or were caused by it. No need for a specialist or an online support group.
Recent Research
In the past couple of years, there have been a handful of additional studies which have looked at this issue. The results have been inconclusive and contradictory.
You can read my analysis of a study done a year ago about the psychometric validity (or lack thereof) of the Internet Addiction Test. Needless to say, the research which could validate this disorder remains to be published. All but one of the studies that I’m aware of haven’t looked at the effects of time on the reported problems of subjects. Without a short longitudinal study (1 year), one cannot answer whether this problem is situational and phasic or something more serious.
2005 APA Update
Well, as the years pass and more and more research is published claiming to support this theorized disorder, I’m happy to revisit some of the outstanding issues and blatant logical fallacies that researchers into maladaptive Internet use continue to make. You’d think that after a decade of research on this issue, someone would learn.
More Online Resources
I and other professionals have talked about the problems facing the concept of IAD before. We’re not saying anything new here. Until there is stronger, more conclusive research in this area, though, you should shy away from anyone looking to treat this problem, since it is a problem that seems to exist more in some professionals’ concept of dysfunction than in reality.
Here are some further links you should check out on this issue:
- Take the Online Addiction Quiz
From the Center for Online Addiction
- Psych Central Editorial
This editorial by Dr. Grohol, written in 1997, examined the usefulness and validity of Internet Addiction Disorder as a diagnosis and something to treat.
- Psych Central’s Internet Addiction Resources
A listing of Internet resources related to this topic.
- Pathological Internet Use
An article by Leonard Holmes, Ph.D. about “Pathological Internet Use.” See also What is Normal Internet Use? by the same author.
- Why is This Thing Eating My Life? Computer and Cyberspace Addiction
This article, and another one like it, were written by online researcher, John Suler, Ph.D. Another interesting perspective.
- Is the Internet Addictive, or Are Addicts Using the Internet?
One of many possible alternative explanations for this phenomenon.
- How Much is Too Much When Spending Time Online?
My own ramblings about the problems with this disorder in October, 1997.
- Communication Addiction Disorder: Concern over Media, Behavior and Effects (PDF)
Joseph B. Walther Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, August, 1999
(BTW, if you don’t get it, this paper is parodying Internet Addiction Disorder.)
- Center for On-Line Addiction
Dr. Kimberly Young’s Center (one of the researchers behind the push for this diagnostic category), which, co-incidentally, offers books, workshops for professionals, and online (?!) counseling to treat this “disorder.”
- The Cause of Internet Addiction?
Christopher McPeck, who holds a BS in Computer Science, has an interesting theory as to this phenomenon’s potential cause.
- Roberts, L. D., Smith, L. M., & Pollack, C. (1996, September). A model of social interaction via computer-mediated communication in real-time text-based virtual environments. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Australian Psychological Society, Sydney, Australia.
|
Is Internet addiction real?
|
|
| More research is being conducted to explore the way people use–and misuse–the Internet.
If you believe what you read, “Internet addiction” is about to make us a nation of derelicts. Men drooling over online pornography, women abandoning their husbands for chat-room lovers and people losing their life savings on gambling Web sites are just a few of the stories peddled in today’s press.
But despite the topic’s prominence, published studies on Internet addiction are scarce. Most are surveys, marred by self-selecting samples and no control groups. The rest are theoretical papers that speculate on the philosophical aspects of Internet addiction but provide no data.
Meanwhile, many psychologists even doubt that addiction is the right term to describe what happens to people when they spend too much time online.
“It seems misleading to characterize behaviors as ‘addictions’ on the basis that people say they do too much of them,” says Sara Kiesler, PhD, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of one of the only controlled studies on Internet usage, published in the September 1998 American Psychologist. “No research has yet established that there is a disorder of Internet addiction that is separable from problems such as loneliness or problem gambling, or that a pa ssion for using the Internet is long-lasting.”
But more psychologists are plunging into Internet addiction research, fascinated by its emotional, psychological and social implications. In their work, they are finding a subset of people who spend so much time online, especially in sexual encounters, that they report problems in their marriages, families and work.
In addition, researchers speculate that certain unique aspects of the Internet may lure people into trouble they might otherwise avoid.
“The Internet is unlike anything we’ve seen before,” says David Greenfield, PhD, founder of the
Center for Internet Studies (www.virtual-addiction.com). “It’s a socially connecting device that’s socially isolating at the same time.”
Who’s vulnerable?
Greenfield has conducted one of the largest surveys on the topic to date: a 1998 study of 18,000 Internet users who logged onto the ABC News Web site, abcnews.com. He found that 5.7 percent of his sample met the criteria for compulsive Internet use. Those findings square with figures from smaller studies done by others, which range from 6 percent to 14 percent. Study participants who met Greenfield‘s criteria (adapted from criteria for compulsive gambling) were particularly hooked on chat rooms, pornography, online shopping and e-mail, he found. About a third said they use the Internet as a form of escape or to alter their mood on a regular basis.
In addition, the “addicted” people were far more likely to admit feelings of losing control in their dealings on the Net than “nonaddicts.” Greenfield believes that the loss of control is just one indication of the potency of the psychoactive nature of the Internet. Other signs include time distortion, accelerated intimacy and decreased inhibition. For instance, 83 percent of those who fit the addiction criteria reported a loss of boundaries when they used the Net, compared to 37 percent who didn’t meet the criteria.
Meanwhile, 75 percent of “addicts” said they had gained “feelings of intimacy” for someone they’d met online, compared to 38 percent of “nonaddicts.” Of those who met Greenfield‘s criteria for Internet addiction, 62 percent said they regularly logged on to pornography sites, spending an average of four hours a week viewing the material. And 37.5 percent of that group masturbated while online, they said.
“Regardless of the technical definition of Internet addiction, there is clearly something unique and powerful going on here,” Greenfield says. “The most widely affected areas seem to be marriages and relationships due to compulsive pornography, cybersex and cyberaffairs.”
Chat rooms and porn sites
Many studies, including Greenfield‘s, also report a preponderance of male Internet addicts. In an unpublished study of 1,300 college students by Keith Anderson, PhD, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 91 of the 103 students who met his criteria for “Internet dependence” were male.
But other studies, including one of the first studies on Internet addiction, by Kimberly Young, PhD, find that women are addicted as often as men–just in different ways. Young, who treats people with Internet problems, is executive director of the Center for On-line Addiction (www.netaddiction.com), founded in 1995. Hers is the first behavioral health-care firm to specialize in Internet-related disorders, offering outpatient and online treatment.
Men and women “addicts” seem to prefer sites that fit behavioral stereotypes of their own gender, according to a study by Alvin Cooper, PhD, and colleagues in the March 2000 issue of Sexual Addiction and Compulsion: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. Their research–which is the only analysis to specifically focus on Internet sexuality–found that women were more likely to spend time flirting or having “cybersex” with others in sexually oriented chat rooms, while men were drawn to porn Web sites.
“Men prefer visual stimuli and more focused sexual experiences, while women are more interested in relationships and interactions,” says Cooper, who is training coordinator at Stanford University‘s counseling and psychological services center, Cowell Student Health Center.
In a study in the May 1998 issue of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Cooper also found that more than 91 percent of Internet users spent less than 11 hours a week logging on to sexual sites. About 82 percent spent less than an hour doing so, “with very few negative repercussions,” he says. (Full text of these research articles appears at http://www.sex-centre.com.)
But men and women “addicts” who spent the most time each week online–11 hours or more–said it was their chat room behavior that most interfered with important aspects of their lives. Cooper will investigate further exactly what those problems are, such as whether online sexuality leads to sex offline, why people might go online when they’re already in a sexual relationship and how such compulsion affects people’s home and work lives.
The Internet also seems to invite both genders to experiment in ways they might otherwise not, Cooper finds. A full 12 percent of women in his sample of 9,265 respondents, compared with 20 percent of the men, have accessed pornography at least once. Cooper speculates that women who visit porn sites may “just be experimenting and wanting to see what the big deal is.”
The available research leads psychologists to question whether those involved in cybersex have sexual addictions, or whether they otherwise wouldn’t engage in illicit sexual encounters but find the Internet an easy medium in which to experiment.
Cooper labels about 17 percent of his sample “at-risk” users–people who “wouldn’t otherwise have gotten involved with sexuality in a problematic way, were it not for the Internet.” Certain qualities of the Internet–its accessibility, affordability and anonymity–make it more difficult to resist the temptation of online sex, Cooper believes.
But for now, this and other questions about Internet use will remain unanswered until more controlled studies are done, critics say. An article in the Feb. 4 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education outlined what those studies should investigate. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute psychologists Joseph B. Walther, PhD, and Larry D. Reid, PhD, suggest that future research include:
* An empirical look not just at problem use, but at healthy use as well.
* More theory and research on why the Internet compared with other outlets is so attractive to some people.
* More study of which comes first, Internet “addiction” or previous mental health or social problems.
It’s also important to examine whether people’s Internet use ebbs and flows over time and why, Kiesler and colleagues note. |
|
|
|
Frequently Asked Questions about Internet Addiction
1.Can the Internet be addictive?
Yes, any behavior that has mood altering properties can become addictive. There are numerous neurochemical changes that occur during pleasurable behaviors. These chemical changes can elicit a “hit” whereby one experiences a sense of temporary pleasure. Any pleasurable events are likely to be repeated. Furthermore addictive behaviors often serve the purpose of blocking other negative emotions or problems in our lives, further reinforcing the addictive cycle.
2. What causes the addictive cycle?
The pattern of addiction is caused by a complex interaction of the removal of discomfort, relief of stress, and the increase of pleasure. The pleasurable experiences are repeated despite the negative consequences. Often there is the experience of guilt and shame after engaging in the addictive behavior (internet use); this shame and guilt can serve as a trigger for further abuse of the internet as a means to cope with the discomfort hence producing a repetitive internet abuse cycle.
3. How do you prevent Internet Addiction?
You prevent it by becoming conscious of your patterns of behavior and taking steps to monitor your use patterns. Telling other people about your Internet use will aid you in managing your behavior better. Also monitoring your emotions and identifying when you tend to use or abuse the Internet, (e.g. spending excessive amounts of time on-line) will help you prevent abuse and addiction.
4. How do you know if you have Internet addiction (IA)?
If your Internet use pattern interferes with your life in any way shape or form, (e.g. does it impact your work, family life, relationships, school, etc.) you may have a problem. In addition, if you find that you are using the Internet as a means to regularly alter your mood you may be developing a problem. It is important to note that it is not the actual time spent on-line that determines if you have a problem, but rather how that time you spend impacts your life.
5. What can you do about Internet addiction if you feel you have it?
First, start by admitting it to yourself, than begin to tell other people in your life that you trust. Admitting it to yourself and those you care about is a first step in breaking the pattern of addiction. There are also support groups for IA although many of them are on-line which may defeat the purpose. It is also recommended that you consult an addictions professional or psychologist familiar with Internet addiction.
6. Can using the Internet be a simple pass-time or hobby?
Yes, it can be. There are millions of people who are on-line and are not abusing the net, nor are they addicted. My research suggests that approximately 4-8% of regular Internet users meet the criteria for Internet addiction. It is not an epidemic, but it is a real problem. Again, spending a lot of time on-line is not the problem (although it can be), rather it is how that time spent impacts your life that determines the seriousness of the problem.
Cybersex or Internet Porn Addition
Family Entertaintment 