Evidence of meeting #47 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was sex.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Kathleen Hare  Doctoral Student, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Mary Anne Layden  Director, Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, As an Individual
Jacqueline Gahagan  Professor, Interim Director, Assistant Dean, Faculty of Health Professions, Dalhousie University, As an Individual

11:35 a.m.

Conservative

Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB

My question is for Ms. Layden. I have two here, and I'm hoping to get through both of them.

Can you talk about how pornography perpetuates a rape culture? You touched on it in your opening remarks, and I'd like you to talk about it a bit more.

11:40 a.m.

Director, Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, As an Individual

Mary Anne Layden

It's male on female violence in the imagery. Also, some of the imagery is rape imagery, and this used to be more popular in the Internet pornography, where the images were ones that made people think they were watching a rape. It was simulated rape, where the female was saying “no, I don't want it”, but the male continued. We were actually teaching them the steps of that.

It also implies patriarchy, that what the male wants is what is going to happen.

In all of those ways, it supports rape culture. Even at this point in our research, given the number of studies we have that say pornography and sexual violence are connected, the probability that there is not a connection between pornography and sexual violence is one in 88 decillion. That is 88 followed by 33 zeros, so the chance that those two things are not connected is just not a possibility at this point.

I treat rapists and sexual violence perpetrators. When I ask them about the beliefs, they have beliefs that are clearly triggered by the messages of pornography. They say, “I have a sexual entitlement. If she did this, then I have a right to have sex with her”, or “This is what happens at fraternity parties. You have sex with women who don't want to have sex”, or “I raped her because I could”. These are all Internet pornography-generated ideas that rapists believe cause them to be triggered and also give them permission to do what they are doing.

11:40 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

I think we have to suspend. We have to go vote in the House, but we are going to return. It will probably be about 30 minutes. I apologize for this delay but it's part of our process.

11:40 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

We have quorum, so we'll resume our questioning.

Thank you, Ms. Harder, for your questions.

I apologize for the delay.

I hope you haven't found it too uncomfortable, Dr. Layden.

Next we'll go to Mr. Davies for questions. He has seven minutes.

March 23rd, 2017 / 11:40 a.m.

NDP

Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us today and lending us your expertise.

I want to start by nailing down some basic terms so that we can situate ourselves in this study. The title of this study, what we're principally narrowing our focus on, is “public health effects of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material”.

I was listening carefully, and I was hearing the word “pornography” a lot. First, when we say pornography, are we restricting it to violent, degrading sexually explicit material, or are we talking about all depictions of sex? I'll age myself a bit and say that in the early eighties, when I was in university, there was a very raging discussion about the distinction between erotica and pornography. I'd like the witnesses to help me out with that.

As well, when we talk about negative health effects, are you talking about negative health effects of pornography generally or of certain depictions of sexual activity?

12:30 p.m.

Doctoral Student, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, As an Individual

Kathleen Hare

I can speak to how we operationalize this definition within our study, because I think it is a really key distinction. The way we understood pornography in our study was that it was looking broadly at materials that depicted sexual activities in unconcealed ways as a way to create excitement. We were not specifically focused on violent and degrading pornography.

On that point, there are a couple of different ways to approach it. I think there's definitely a distinction between pornography and violent pornography, both by what you can draw from the literature and by the way that the youth in my study talked about it. I think in regular pornography, they would often talk about the variety of genres that exist. You have everything from erotica to couples uploading amateur videos of themselves to Hentai, which is a kind of cartoon. You have a variety of different types. Then you also have the types that people would talk about in terms of their violence.

The way I would understand violent pornography is that it's non-consensual acts of violence, degradation, or dehumanization in pornography. For me, the key word in there is “non-consensual”, recognizing that there's also pornography from, say, kink communities where it is consensual and might otherwise depict activities that seem violent.

For me, the key point is that looking at it, it's very difficult to separate out, because what is violent is subjective. You really need to consider that violent pornography is consumed alongside and in relation to wider sexual content. If we're going to be talking about this, and talking about pornography, it really should be talked about in terms of the medium as a whole, looking at how people are making meaning of these meanings in relation to both the violent pornography and the non-violent pornography, and how they're understanding that themselves.

12:30 p.m.

NDP

Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC

Ms. Hare, perhaps I can direct a question at you and then Dr. Layden. This may be my confusion, but in listening to your testimony, you talked about the research results being somewhat contradictory.

Dr. Layden, I think you gave very concrete recitations of research findings, in a way that left me with the impression that there's very little doubt, in your mind, about what the research shows, so I guess I'll address my question to you.

Is the research extremely clear to you on the negative health impacts of violent and degrading pornography? Maybe I'll ask you the same question as well: do you make a distinction between that kind of pornography...? Is there any kind of healthy depiction of human sexuality visually that doesn't have these negative health impacts?

12:30 p.m.

Director, Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, As an Individual

Mary Anne Layden

The answer is sort of complex. Some of the research does sort out imagery that they consider violent and non-violent. In fact, though, some studies find that even the non-violent pornography increases the acceptance of behaviours like rape. We thought that only the violent pornography would produce that, but some of the research says that non-violent pornography produces this as well.

Next, with the images that are violent and degrading, if you ask subjects to look at whether they are you looking at things that are violent and degrading, the more they look at it, the less they rate it as violent and degrading. By asking for subject perceptions, which some studies do, you find that they become inured to things.

If you ask subjects—I don't want to be too graphic here—but if you ask subjects.... There's something like A to M, which means—I'll have to be graphic—ass to mouth, that is, a male inserting his penis into a woman's anus and then taking it right out and putting it in her mouth with her feces in her own mouth. You ask subjects whether that is degrading. After they look at that for a while, they decide it's not degrading pornography anymore, while the females continue to rate it as degrading. So it's hard to say whether we are looking at degrading pornography: ask the person who is looking at it.

Ejaculating into a woman's face first looks degrading, but then later the males say it's not degrading. The woman still says it is degrading. It's hard sometimes to categorize, depending upon on who is looking at it and who is evaluating it. That's the complication in the research as to who says it's degrading.

With this phenomenon that says even the non-degrading and the non-violent have some negative aspects and produce negative outcome, all of it includes what we call “boundary crossing”. That is, an individual who is not intimate with the people acting—that is, the viewer, who is not intimate—is engaging in an intimate activity with these individuals, which is boundary crossing. Why am I being intimate with somebody with whom I'm not intimate? I'm watching somebody; I'm visually invading someone. What we found is that the visual invading of people with whom you are not intimate leads to the physical invading of people. There's a connection just in the fact that you can boundary cross.

We thought originally, when we started the research, that only aggressive and degrading were going to cause the impact. More and more, we're finding that it's all of it.

The final piece is that it's very hard in this day and age to find visual depictions that aren't degrading and violent. The research says that 88% of the images have physical aggression in them. More than 50% have degrading images in them. There are less and less non-degrading, non-violent depictions out there to actually look at. We've developed a tolerance for it. People who look at it look at harder and harder kinds, so that the non-degrading, non-violent has become a small subset of what's on the Internet.

A to M is in fact the fastest-growing image on the subset in Internet pornography, and invariably people are asking for images in which men ejaculate into women's faces and into their eyes. Some of the research says that will produce pink eye and infections of the eye, and other kinds of things. That is an image that many men now think of as a common thing to do and are asking their partners to do, because it's so common in the pornography that's on the Internet.

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

Dr. Eyolfson, seven minutes.

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for coming.

There were a lot of points made about education earlier.

Ms. Hare, you said that there are young people who attempt to self-educate with pornography because it's freely available and they can do it in private. Dr. Gahagan, you had said we need to do more in terms of properly instructing young people in safe sex practices, boundaries, these sorts of things.

One of the challenges that's found any time we try to introduce sexual health education in schools is that there are often very organized lobbies that are opposing this for various reasons. They think that it might violate the province of the parents to be the sole domain over telling their children about this. Others might have a religious objection to saying that it's okay to be nice to gay people, these sorts of things.

Do you see a role for making such education mandatory, like all other subjects, to say that you can't opt out of math, you can't opt out of history, and you can't opt out of this?

12:35 p.m.

Professor, Interim Director, Assistant Dean, Faculty of Health Professions, Dalhousie University, As an Individual

Prof. Jacqueline Gahagan

Yes, without a doubt. The point I was trying to make around the proposition of developing a national sexual health promotion strategy was aimed at exactly that. There would be a federal standard to which all curriculum would be held. Again, we see across the nation a huge variability in terms of what's being taught and how it's being taught. The end result is that we're not evaluating what impact that's having on actual behaviours across the life course.

To use the example I alluded to earlier about rates of STIs increasing in Canada since the 1990s, clearly more education needs to be done. I think it should not be optional. I think it should be just like history. Parents can object to their kids being taught history, but this is part of the Canadian curriculum. This is the standard. Everybody gets it.

12:40 p.m.

Liberal

Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB

All right. Thank you. I was expecting a longer answer, but that was actually a perfect answer. It answered the question very succinctly. Thank you for that.

The whole purpose of this study concerns the public health implications of this. Some of this has been alluded to in the testimony, and I'll give everyone a chance to answer this, but what are the public health effects that you would list that need to be addressed, that could be improved by an education strategy?

12:40 p.m.

Professor, Interim Director, Assistant Dean, Faculty of Health Professions, Dalhousie University, As an Individual

Prof. Jacqueline Gahagan

Absolutely one of the key ones, as I've already alluded to, is the rate of sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections. That's a key indicator of success in terms of whether or not you have increased or decreased those, but there needs to be some evaluative component in the way that sexual health education is being offered. If you look at what public health does in responding to outbreaks—SARS, for example—there has to be a target. What is the target? It's SARS. What's the intended outcome? It's reducing the likelihood of SARS spreading.

When we think about the logic in public health terms of doing better in terms of how we provide sexual health education, and evaluate what impact it's having, there are particular sources of data we can look at and track over time. In fact I did a project with the Public Health Agency of Canada in developing a sexual health assessment tool.

Do we have a snapshot of Canadian sexual health that cuts across age, across region, across school boards? No, we don't. Do we have sufficient data to say that these are public health indicators that we can actually improve on? I would argue that we could. The U.K., Australia, and Wales, as I alluded to earlier, have wonderful national sexual health standards. They make those available to people as a public health priority, not as an optional piece of information that people can consume or not consume.

I think we need to be more strategic about what intended outcome we're looking for if we're talking about the public health effects of pornography.

12:40 p.m.

Liberal

Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB

Thank you.

Ms. Hare, do you have anything to add to that?

12:40 p.m.

Doctoral Student, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, As an Individual

Kathleen Hare

I can't add anything to that. Thank you.

12:40 p.m.

Liberal

Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB

Okay. Thank you.

Dr. Layden, do you have anything to add to that point?

12:40 p.m.

Director, Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, As an Individual

Mary Anne Layden

In the States we are pursuing what we call the “public health crisis”, and a number of the states have already voted to declare the use of pornography as a public health crisis. The Centers for Disease Control is considering it as well.

We're looking at it broadly, so that there are some health crises. Such things as STIs, and erectile dysfunction in young men, are part of the health crises. Some are coming up over the horizon that we may consider in the future. For example, there's been a dramatic increase in anal and colon cancer in young adults by thousands of a percentage point. They're trying to determine what's causing that. It may have some connection to the increase in anal sex. We're looking at that.

They also consider other factors, such as the increase in divorce that's caused by pornography and the increase in infidelity in marriage, as part of the public health crisis. There's the sexual violence crisis. We have a crisis in our military and we have a crisis on our campuses with sexual assaults in those areas. They consider that part of the public health crisis. They also consider other kinds of crimes that are hooked to the use of pornography. Not just rape but also the prostituting of women and the sex trafficking of children have been shown to be connected to the use of pornography.

So they consider a public health crisis broadly, with the definition that it can't be solved by an individual. It affects many of the people in the culture. It has broad effects, and these are all considered effects—the divorce rate, the impact on prostituted women and prostituted children, and the physical health effect. We've tried to pursue a number of solutions. The public health crisis is one of them. We've also tried to consider age verification online as a place to do blocking. They're also considering that in the U.K., trying to get Internet service providers to have opt-in policies so that they won't send pornography unless you opt in, and trying to get the companies involved in that as a stopgap step.

12:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

That completes our seven-minute rounds.

We're going to five-minute rounds, and we're going to start with Ms. Harder.

12:45 p.m.

Conservative

Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB

My first question is with regard to policy. I sit on the Status of Women committee. We just got done with studying violence against women and girls. Pornography was a significant part of that, of course, specifically in terms of forming the attitudes of men and boys and then their actions toward women and girls.

That being the case, I'm wondering if you can comment, starting with Ms. Layden, on the public health concerns we're facing here with regard to the formation of attitudes and then the actions of men and boys against women and girls, based on their access to pornography. Also, I've read that, on average, young men here in Canada are exposed to pornography at the age of 11. That concerns me. It concerns me that for many of them it is their primary source of education, which is what's being said here today, and that it's how their attitudes towards women are being formed.

12:45 p.m.

Director, Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, As an Individual

Mary Anne Layden

We're also very concerned about the forming of attitudes in children, because their brains are still very malleable, their attitudes are very malleable, and the potency of an image is quite impactful on children. It is also impactful on adults. I don't mean to say that because we're concerned about children, we're not concerned about adults, because we do find the impact on adults as well. Even though we have a dramatic increase in child-on-child sexual assault and it's a great concern that children are looking at these kinds of images and then assaulting other children, our concern is also about adults assaulting children and adults assaulting other adults.

We think this is one of the most potent attitude producers that we can name. Given all those factors that produce learning, I can't think of anything else that could impact your sexual attitudes more than pornography, because of its pervasiveness, because it's massively toxic, and because of certain phenomena about how the brain works.

For example, there is research that says when women look at men in sexualized imagery, women use the part of their brain that is specialized for looking at humans and human faces—the facial recognition centre part of the brain—but when men look at women in sexualized imagery, they do not use that part of their brain. They do not use the part of the brain that is specialized for humans and human faces. They use the part of the brain that is specialized for the use of tools and objects, and then they use the rules that are applied to tools: if it breaks, throw it away—it's only as good as its usefulness.

Even brain phenomena are telling us that these are dramatically potent images and can produce attitudes, behaviours, triggers for attitudes, and beliefs that say, “I have permission to do this”, especially the belief that everybody is doing it. People will do what they think everybody is doing. The drive towards sexuality is very strong, and if you think everybody is doing it and nobody is getting hurt by it, then you are very likely to do it.

It's the same phenomenon you see when you legalize prostitution in a country. You have a massive increase in the number of males that will prostitute women: since it's legal, it must be fine, and we're all doing it, so we might as well do it. Followed by that, of course, you then have a dramatic increase in child sex trafficking because we don't enough prostituted women to meet that new demand. As soon as you have a belief that says it's okay, it doesn't hurt anybody, and everybody is doing it, people will do it. Pornography is the very best at producing that permission-giving belief.

12:45 p.m.

Conservative

Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB

Thank you.

I'll ask you the same question, Ms. Hare, and then we can go from there.

You don't want to take it?

12:45 p.m.

Doctoral Student, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, As an Individual

Kathleen Hare

I'll yield to Dr. Gahagan on this one.

12:45 p.m.

Professor, Interim Director, Assistant Dean, Faculty of Health Professions, Dalhousie University, As an Individual

Prof. Jacqueline Gahagan

It's a great question. I'm going to speak to the policy component.

As we know, Canada has a long-standing gender-based analytic framework that has been dusted off and redeployed as the GBA+ framework. My suggestion is that if we're looking at this from a policy perspective, let's use the tools that we already have made a constitutional commitment to, including GBA, and let's look at how well GBA is being incorporated into evaluating sexual health promotion in schools, as an example.

If the point that our colleague from the States is trying to make is that all pornography is toxic to the brain, let's actually do a gender-based analytic response to that by looking at how sexual health information that is correct information deals with that issue of misogyny or with that issue of “rape is always okay”, and if you see it, you just enact it. To me, that ebb and flow of logic really does speak to the need to look at what are Status of Women tools bringing to the task of answering those questions you've alluded to. I think that the GBA+ framework is something that we should be bringing to task on this particular issue in Canada.

12:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

The time is up.

Before we go to Ms. Sidhu, I want to alert the committee that we're going to go until 1:15 p.m. Some of the members have to leave at 1:15 p.m., but we would like to get as much of the testimony as we can, considering that we were—

12:50 p.m.

Conservative

Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB

On a point of order, I believe you have to ask for unanimous consent to extend the time.