The Problem with Porn: Part 2

Sorry these posts have been so slow in coming. Between travel and illness, not to mention unreliable internet, I've started to wonder if maybe the universe doesn't want me to write about pornography! But a promise is a promise, so here we go. For this post, I want to focus on one of the most controversial areas of pornography: child pornography.

When I was in high school, I attended a lecture where a woman asked all the students in the room a series of questions about pornography. She asked, by a raise of hands, how many of us thought porn was wrong. A few of us raised our hands. She asked how many of us thought rape porn was bad. All but two people (both male) raised their hands. She looked stunned, but the two male students held their ground. Then, a little hesitantly, she asked how many of us thought child porn was wrong, and everyone raised their hands.

I forget where the lecture went after that, but I can't forget how shocked I felt at the time, to discover that anyone thought rape porn was ok. I wonder, looking back, if I was defining rape pornography differently than those students were - most likely I thought she meant real rapes that were recorded, when she was probably talking about porn that was meant to portray rape. Either way, I can't see how watching rape with the intention of getting turned on wouldn't warp the way a person looked at other human beings. But at least we found common ground where child porn is concerned. I suspect that even if those two students were okay with child porn (say, for instance, with teenage actors) they wouldn't have risked the social stigma of admitting so.

People get very worked up about the child porn industry, and with good reason. According to a 2010 study published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, the Canadian gov't goes after more sex offenders for child porn than for anything other sex crime. The same study found that the individuals they surveyed about child pornography actually overestimated the likelihood that child pornography offenders would view child pornography again, indicating that most people see child pornography as a highly addictive habit. But these same study participants respond more harshly to child pornography offenders who have viewed younger victims (Lam, Mitchell, Seto). So even with an issue like child pornography, the issue is complicated in the public perspective.

In the US, we also see varied reactions to child pornography, and even to sexual abuse of minors, depending on the age of the victims. And even officials sometimes find it difficult to define child pornography. A 2007 study published in Police Practice and Research, described some difficulties faced in prosecuting child porn offenders. While most child porn offenders were found to have graphic images of prepubescent minors, it's possible that that trend was only the case because it's more difficult to determine whether someone is a minor if that person is not prepubescent. Additionally, sometimes an offense doesn't technically fit into an existing statute (Wells, Finkelhor, Wolak & Mitchell).

Why does any of this matter in a general discussion of pornography? After all, most pornography proponents don't support child pornography, particularly not with  prepubescent kids. But it's important to remember that the general pornography market is part of the child pornography issue. In the name of expressing their own sexuality, a person might seek out an image or a movie of an 18-year-old woman in a skimpy school girl outfit. That would be completely legal, Jean Kilbourne, the creator of Killing Us Softly has described in great detail how dangerous it is to mix images of childhood with sexy images. To do so is to create or reinforce in oneself a predisposition to find childish things sexy.

It would be faulty to assume that every person or even most people who view pornography of 18-year-olds in school uniforms will begin viewing child pornography. But the circulation of those images encourages that particular market and increases the likelihood that images of 15 year olds and 16 year olds will slip into the mix - perhaps without the viewer's knowledge that he or she is breaking federal law.

There's also the issue of children and teenagers who are exposed to pornography. In a 2009 study in Child Abuse Review, Michael Flood found that while exposure to pornography was complicated and that a viewer's response was impacted by their emotional and mental state beforehand as well as by the type of pornography viewed, for most children and "young people" (ages 11-17), pornography reinforced any sexist attitudes they may have already had, in addition to providing them with highly inaccurate representations of sexuality. You might argue that it's not the pornography producer's fault if kids stumble upon their material, but who hasn't encountered unexpected porn pop ups without warning? In fact, Flood found that 53% of minors between the ages of 11 and 17 had "experienced something on the internet they thought was offensive or disgusting" (388). Kids experience a lot of negative side effects from being exposed to graphic images too early, and yet those images are often unavoidable on the internet, even with internet filters.

My guess is that most people who view porn don't knowingly view porn with minors in it, so I don't mean to indict porn consumers with this post, since as Erica has pointed out, pornography comes in many varieties and isn't always the commercial, computer pop-up kind that it's always stereotyped as. But child pornography is an important factor in the regulation of pornography, and it's an issue we have to keep in mind.