The Great Porn Debate

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 In an unpublished report of research (described on LBC 29th April 2021) Taylor suggested pornography was responsible for 51% of women reporting that they had experienced a male partner*1 having sex with them or performing a sex act on them whilst they were asleep. That's 51% of approximately 22,000 adult women, so this is a serious issue, and needs to be understood, which is why my opinion is that it is unhelpful to reach for pornography as an explanation, as I hope to argue.

There seems to be a simple, quick method to look at the relationship between pornography and offending. It may appear trivial, but think of the question we are considering - is pornography responsible for offending? The simple method consists of two questions;

1. Have you ever been exposed to any material that would be considered to be pornography (intended to produce a sexual response in the consumer)? Certainly if you are male the answer is likely to be yes.

2. Have you ever committed a sexual offence (let's use the UK's Sexual Offences Act)? This doesn't require that you have been caught or prosecuted, just that you have done it. I am going to assume that few of you have.

If there is a discrepancy between the answers to 1 and 2 then clearly pornography is not incontrovertibly linked to sexual offending. This does not mean that pornography might not play a role or have negative effects on us, but does mean it is far more nuanced than the naïve, knee-jerk, media-friendly demonization of pornography as the cause of sexual offending. If we assume that only forensic psychologists might read this you might be thinking that we are not a representative sample. That's true, but if pornography is the all-pervasive evil that it is often portrayed to be then surely we are as vulnerable to all-pervasive evil as anyone else.

To do justice to the question we need to go deeper and think a little harder. It turns out that it is difficult to write about pornography without double-entendres.

Part of the reason why I think that understanding pornography, and doing research concerned with pornography, is so difficult is because there are some fundamental questions that we need to address before we seek to understand the link between sexual offending and pornography.

This was the original order of these arguments in my presentation, but hindsight is a great teacher. 

The first issue with attempting to answer the question about pornography and offending is, I think, that offending is not a very useful threshold. In part it is because there are many negative impacts that pornography can have that do not reach the threshold of an offence (if you think about the negative impact pornography use can have on relationships). There are two other issues. One is that we need to think about what we count as a sexual offence. If I have done Act A on you and I am prosecuted but not convicted then we can't argue that A didn't happen, or that I did it, but we can argue that it wasn't an offence, as I was not found guilty. What if I perform Act A, it is illegal, but you don't report it? What if the police decide to warn me rather than see if the CPS want to prosecute? The problem is that we are not seeing the forest for seeking particular trees. The second issue is linked; we know that there are many extra legal factors that impact upon jury decision making. Because I am enormously pretty I won't be convicted (unless you too are enormously pretty, but maybe I will wear a suit and cry a little). Until we decide what the threshold is that we believe is too much for pornography to impact then the debate on pornography and offending (or behaviour) will rage on.

If we forget about the above, and that offending might be unhelpful as a category, we can still identify other issues with having consensus on pornography. Let's consider the prevalence of pornography use and the prevalence of sexual offending. I am going to steal some of the figures I used in my presentation, which in turn were taken from other sources, so fingers crossed I am not taken to task for using them in an educational manner.

This figure is data collected from PornHub, reported by Dwulit and Rzymski (2019).

Since 2013 PornHub reports a steady rise in visitors to their site, and presumably everyone who visits PornHub is accessing pornography. Other pornography sites are available. So there is a lot of accessing  or pornography, from this we don't know ages, genders, what people accessed, for how long, if there are visitors who visit a lot and stay a long time, and so forth.

In 2018 the ONS provided data on police recorded sexual offending and one can extract a graph for the same period of time.

This shows that over the same time period sexual offending has increased. We don't know the details of the who and the what, but it's an increase. On this evidence, as access to pornography increases the prevalence of sexual offending increases. Bingo.

Bingo indeed. However, if we look at the full data they provided and add some extra information it is clear that this relationship might not be as strong as we might have originally believed;

The data suggest that for a long period of time (when presumably porn-access was still on the increase) sexual offending was mostly stable, and then when there were particular events, police recorded events increased. So is the problem the pornography or is it that other events make people more inclined to report?

This highlights how difficult it is to link pornography to offending, as we need to take account of other events that may be impacting the pattern of the data. 

You can bet that pornography access has increased during COVID and that so have some forms of sexual offending, but is there a link or are there other events that explain the increase in sexual offending more usefully (restrictions on movement, impact upon relationships, finances, ways to cope with adverse events...)?

Often we read about the issue is hardcore pornography and the most serious sexual offences. Ferguson and Hartley (2009) examined the rates of availability of hardcore pornography and rapes over a period of time.

A big issue here is how are rates of rape measured. If it is convictions then we know that rape is notoriously under-convicted, if it is reporting then we know that rape is notoriously under-reported. So, we also have to think beyond the presentation of the data as necessarily being the full picture, but equally we need to use the best data that we have to make decisions or else we have anarchy and no rationale for anything.

In 2014 the British Sex Survey (who knew that there was such a thing?) estimated that 76% of adult males watch online pornography. For the same time period there were 75,000 sexual offences in the UK. If all of these offences were committed by adult men then this would account for .23% of the adult male population.

What is Pornography? This is not a trivial question. If pornography is defined as being something with the intent of producing some kind of sexual response, or that can produce a sexual response, we know that people's sexual interests differ. On that basis we can only have a sense of what most people would consider pornography. What counts as hardcore pornography? If this definition is based on how explicit it is, can we have an objective measure of hardcore-ness? I would suggest not. I would suggest that there is nuance based on what we have seen and done, our values, other basic issues of cognition and perception (at the risk of labouring this point, something described as pornography that is auditory will not be pornography to someone who cannot hear). We also know that the genders have different ranges for what can result in a sexual response, but would we label a documentary that shows apes mating as pornography?

If we can't decide what pornography is, how do we measure it? Often studies ask questions such as, have you ever watched an X-rated film. If that a good measure of pornography? How much pornography needs to be in a film for it to be X-rated? How well can you remember your porn-history? When did you first see porn, or become a user of it (and what does that mean, is a user different from someone who accesses it?), and how much pornography have you been exposed to in the last year and what kind was it?

What counts as an effect of pornography? Sexual offending is one, but as I hope I have suggested, it isn't a great one. Is an association an effect? If we collect data about your porn use and then ask a question such as, "if you wouldn't get caught would you rape someone?" are we measuring an effect of pornography or an effect of not getting caught, or of both? At my most cynical I am genuinely concerned that something only counts as an effect of pornography if pornography is shown to be a problem. if there is no effect, or a positive effect, it is seen as evidence of a methodological problem. That's a powerful case of your opinion only matters if it is the same as mine, and if it isn't the same as mine then we won't take it into account as there is something wrong with you.

My final basic question is this; when we are examining the effects of pornography on offending, who are we examining? White, middle-class students are not the only people who access pornography and sexually offend. In fact it might be a more powerful argument of the problem with porn if we show that regardless of socio-economic status, gender identify, sexuality, race, education, age that there is a link between pornography and offending. I don't think that we do that. Is that because it is only a problem if it is a heterosexual problem?

So that's why I think the question of a link between pornography and offending is problematic and this might explain why we have a good sense that pornography does have an impact on life, but not on offending. For example, 

Brown et al. (2005) showed that exposure to sexual media is linked to white adolescents' sexual activity (e.g. early sexual intercourse) but not black teens' sexual activity.

Horvath (2013) found that exposure to pornography is linked to young people's sexual beliefs.

Coy and Horvath (2014) showed that exposure to pornography is linked to boys thinking of girls as sex objects.

Sun et al. (2016) found a link between exposure to pornography and what males ask sexual partners to do.

Mass and Dewey (2018) found that women who use internet pornography endorse more rape myths than women who do not.

These are all good reasons to have concerns about pornography, but they don't necessarily link to offending, and as a reminder, that is the focus of this piece, only offending.

To finish I want to mention some work from some trainees that I have been lucky enough to work with because I think they provide some further fuel to the fire that I suppose I am attempting to light, which is to shed light on the lack of evidence for a link between pornography and offending, and my concern that too often the two are conflated because it is an easy, believable link to make. To avoid either identifying or embarrassing them I won't name them, but use a first initial.

"S" carried out an innovative study where she exposed people to soft-core and neutral images of women and looked at the impact that exposure to these images had. She found that both decreased sexually aggressive attitudes. So soft-core pornography, as still images, might be protective. What? Of course, there might be other processes going on in this study, but is it possible that for some people, in some situations, soft-core pornography exposure might have a positive impact on society? Maybe. Is it an effect that might last and might actually be borne out in the real world? Maybe.

"E" carried out a systematic review examining the link between exposure to pornography and sexual offending. She concluded, in a peer-reviewed paper, "It also consistently appears that men who sexually offend report less exposure to pornography and that exposure to pornography does not result in more harm being caused to the victim." Note that this is self-report, so there might be issues there, but many studies that report links to negative behaviours are also self-report, so the same caution must be applied.

Finally, "H" co-wrote a chapter concerned with exposure to internet pornography and sexual offending and concluded that pornography is a risk factor, but a risk factor for people who are vulnerable. So this is important, rather than pornography is bad, pornography is bad for people who it can be bad for. It's a more nuanced, complex argument, but we are nuanced, complex beasts. This ties in with a 2020 government report, concluding that pornography is one among other potential factors.

So, if pornography is a factor for vulnerable people, what might make people vulnerable? The UN have found that only 14% of women and 10% of men are free of bias against women. Could the extent to which one is biased towards women be a vulnerability that makes one more likely to respond negatively when exposed to pornography? There are studies looking at the dehumanisation and objectification of women (e.g. Bevens and Loughnan, 2019), which could be vulnerability factors that make pornography more impactful, and another trainee, "J" is doing work on the effects of Social Dominance. The value of these ideas is that bias, dehumanisation, and dominance are not gender specific and might also explain if we find that pornography also has a relationship with offending against people regardless of gender, sexuality, race, etc.

I'll finish up with the content of my original, final slide. 

"As someone who has worked with offenders, some of whom have been exposed to pornography, some who haven’t, some who have a preference for violent sexual content, some who don’t, the literature is in line with much of my clinical experience.

This leads me to conclude that asking the question, does pornography effect sexual offending, is the wrong question to ask.

For me the correct question to ask is, who are the people whose sexual offending is (partly) a result of exposure to pornography. I suspect it is easier to work with vulnerabilities than it is to banish pornography."

*1 As this research is currently unpublished I don't know the details of its methodology or analysis. One might wonder, what percentage of women experience this from a female partner and what percentage of men experience this from a male partner? If pornography is the cause (rather than part of the cause) then we might expect similar numbers as pornography is not solely a heterosexual male domain.

By the way, as Taylor states, sexual activity with a sleeping person, who cannot give consent, is an offence, so in this case we are considering the link between pornography and offending as opposed to considering the link between pornography and antisocial or sexually aberrant behaviour.

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