I am not familiar with Canadian law, but I will say that research on the content of pornography indicates that close to 90% of the images that are currently available include physical and behavioural aggression, and the vast majority of it is male directed at female. So the overwhelming amount of pornography that involves physical and sexual violence is what in fact our youth are looking at. I am concerned about that end, that we have a massive amount of pornography.
In our research, in the States, we are hard pressed to find any young adult males who have not been exposed to pornography. It's almost at the universal level, and the age of being exposed is getting younger and younger—one recent study said 11—so we have a combination of very young people universally exposed to universally aggressive and violent content.
When you are looking at this imagery, when you have brain arousal effects, let's say, the amygdala is aroused and the prefrontal cortex shuts down, so your executive functions, your rational functions, are actually shut down at the point of arousal. These individuals are not making adult, mature responses to this. You can't block those brain responses by decoding pornography or by doing media analysis of it. The impact on the brain and on the responses has already happened.
This impact is very quick. In one study, people who were shown an image of violence mixed with sexuality, after one presentation started to use violent images to make themselves sexually aroused, so the sexual template spreads very quickly and without a lot of rational intervention. If we are showing them pictures of criminal activity and then expecting them not to do it, that's really rather naive, from my point of view. I think that they are going to do it.