Forensic Thoughts

I t turns out that early sexual abuse is associated with earlier onset of puberty (Noll et al., (2016). This is fascinating. Not only can trauma have an impact on us psychologically, but also physiologically. I expect there are reasons why this makes sense, but because something makes sense doesn't prevent it from being amazing. When I found out about this, only a week ago, I wondered if anyone had looked at the the possibility that exposure to pornography might be similarly associated. For me this would be further evidence of concerning impacts of pornography and raise the question, is exposure to pornography, for some people, traumatic, or are there other mechanisms that could explain such a finding? Turns out that a study has been done, in Taiwan, showing just such an association. Home

I was recently asked to give a talk, entitled The Link Between Pornography and Sexual Offending , and I thought why keep it restricted to the audience of that conference (as it was, my internet crashed on the first day and on the second day there were minutes lost to the problem of using Zoom, screen-sharing, and two screens. Why are simple things so complex?), why not plonk a version of it here. So, here it is. Please note, I am not concerned with the morality of pornography, that is another, complex argument that you are welcome to have on your own time. Pornography as an artefact and issue has been around for a long time, so why worry about it? Simply because every time anything happens, pornography is raised as the cause. Almost immediately that there was a suspect in the case of Sarah Everard the media quoted experts blaming porn. In an unpublished report of research (described on LBC 29th April 2021) Taylor suggested pornography was responsible for 51% of women reporting that the...

Scientists have been studying cellular clocks for some time, and these biological timepieces are thought to be responsible for many of the differences between species. For example, as the clocks of mice run faster than the clocks of humans, this might explain why mice are small and live less long. The clocks of bigger animals, such as elephants and whales, have much slower ticking clocks. In a recent article in nature it is written, " These differences affect how big an animal gets, how its parts are arranged and perhaps even how long it will live. " As Olivia Newton-John sang , let's get metaphorical. If we think of the humble wristwatch, it has a fairly basic role, to give us a sense of hours and minutes. Some give us seconds, some dates, some lap times, international time zones, alarms, address books, notifications of emails, heart rate, daily steps, quality of sleep - and so it goes on.  Which is the wristwatch? In some ways it doesn't matter, if it fits on your w...