Health Committee on April 4th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

I'd like to welcome everybody to our third meeting on M-47.

I'm going to read the text of M-47.

That the Standing Committee on Health be instructed to examine the public health effects of the ease of access and viewing of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material on children, women and men, recognizing and respecting the provincial and territorial jurisdictions in this regard, and that the said Committee report its findings to the House no later than July 2017.

I want to welcome our guests today, Dr. William Fisher, distinguished professor, Department of Psychology, Western University; and Dr. Kim Roberts, professor and head of the child memory lab at Wilfrid Laurier University.

We also hope to have Dr. Neil Malamuth from the University of California by video conference. He has not connected yet.

Dr. Fisher, you have the floor.

[Dr. William Fisher, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Good morning, Chairperson, and honourable members of Parliament. Thank you for asking me to talk with you about the public health impact of online violent and degrading pornography.

I am a professor of psychology at Western University, and I have four decades of research experience, grant funding, and peer-reviewed publications in this area.

I'll very briefly describe scientific methods that have been used to study the impact of pornography. I'd like to outline what science can and cannot tell us about this subject.

Let me first describe experimental studies of pornography's impact. In experimental studies of pornography's impact, research participants view sexually explicit material or non-sexual material, and their responses are studied. In this fashion, experimental research seeks to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between exposure to pornography and subsequent behaviour.

Experimental studies of the effect of violent pornography on men's aggressive behaviour were initially said to show that violent pornography causes men to aggress against women.

Experimental studies that claimed a cause-and-effect relationship between violent pornography and aggression employed a variant of the following procedures.

First, a male participant, almost always a young university student, receives verbal abuse and direct physical aggression—nine painful electrical shocks delivered by a young woman. After the young man is verbally abused and physically attacked, he is shown five minutes or so of violent pornography. The young man is then instructed by the experimenter to send electrical shocks to the woman who attacked him. Young men who have seen violent pornography send stronger electrical shocks than do men who have seen non-violent material.

I note and emphasize that the men in this research have been told to send electrical shocks to the female, and they have no opportunity to respond in a non-aggressive manner.

It has been observed that these experimental studies are so artificial and constrained that they tell us essentially nothing about the impact of violent pornography in the real world.

In experimental research, men who have been verbally abused and physically attacked by a woman and who have seen violent pornography are not provided with any opportunity to respond in a non-aggressive fashion.

Follow-up research by me and my colleagues has shown that when such studies are repeated, with the added provision of an opportunity for the men who have been subject to aggression and have seen violent pornography to respond in a non-aggressive fashion, virtually no male participants were aggressive against the female.

Experimental research by Dr. Malamuth and his colleague J. Ceniti has also shown that even prolonged exposure to massive amounts of violent pornography over a four-week period had no effect on men's aggression against a woman when they were provided with an opportunity to be aggressive against a woman a week later.

Let's turn to correlational studies. Correlational studies of pornography involve collecting men's reports of their use of pornography and their sexually aggressive behaviour. Correlational studies assess the relationship of A and B, but they cannot establish cause and effect. When A and B are found to be related, A may cause B; B may cause A; or very often, C, an unmeasured variable, may cause both A and B.

Many correlational studies report a relationship between men's reports of exposure to pornography and their reports of their sexually aggressive behaviour.

Correlational findings for a relationship between pornography and sexual aggression are consistent with the possibility that pornography contributes to sexual aggression. Correlational findings for a relationship between pornography and sexual aggression are equally consistent with the possibility that men who are sexually aggressive like to use pornography. Correlational findings for a relationship between pornography and sexual aggression are also entirely consistent with the possibility that some unmeasured factor, say, men's sex drive or their pre-existing anti-social personality traits, cause both sexually aggressive behaviour and the choice to use pornography.

In fact, in our research lab, and in our publication on this subject, when we measured men's sex drive, their pre-existing anti-social personality traits, and their use of pornography, we found that men's sex drive and their anti-social personality traits predicted aggression against women and that, when taking these factors into account, pornography played no role.

A number of studies of sex offenders' use of pornography have been conducted. Three of these studies found that convicted sex offenders report less use of pornography than comparative samples do. Another study found that 1% out of a sample of 259 sex offenders were influenced by pornography in the commission of their offence.

A review of the sex offender and pornography literature concluded that “sex offenders typically do not have earlier or more unusual exposure to pornography in childhood or adolescence, compared to non-offenders”.

Comparisons of the rate of sex crime in the same country before and after legalization of pornography are also informative. Denmark legalized most forms of pornography in 1969. Rape offences reported to the police showed little change after legalization. The same pattern was reported in Sweden, which legalized pornography in 1970, and West Germany, which legalized pornography in 1973.

A critical issue is the impact of unlimited access to all forms of Internet pornography on rates of sexual assault in Canada and the U.S. since the inception of essentially unlimited access to it in the mid-1990s. Rates of sexual assault in the United States have been decreasing over time and have continued to decrease since Internet access to all forms of pornography began in the 1990s. Canadian rates of sexual assault showed no increase in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014, across a decade and a half of unlimited access to all forms of Internet pornography by virtually anyone in Canada.

Findings concerning access to Internet pornography and sexual aggression in the U.S. and Canada do not support the view that online pornography contributes to sexual assault. We can also look at the relationship between a decade and a half of access to Internet pornography and rates of sexual activity in Canadian and American adolescents. Rates of teenage pregnancy and childbirth in Canada have been declining for decades. These declines have continued since the onset of widespread access to Internet pornography by Canadian adolescents. Canadian adolescents' rates of sexual intercourse, sexual intercourse with multiple partners, and condom use have also not changed with widespread use of Internet pornography.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also reported that the proportion of U.S. adolescents who have had sexual intercourse has decreased and the proportion of sexually active U.S. adolescents who use condoms has increased since the onset of availability of Internet pornography.

I have a final word or two concerning pornography users' attitudes towards women. Our research group, with SSHRC support, has analyzed nationally representative U.S. data from 1975 to 2010 and found that individuals who report using pornography in the preceding year have significantly more egalitarian attitudes towards women than do those who have not used pornography. These results are consistent with several other studies showing that men who frequently rent or view sexually explicit videos hold more egalitarian views of women.

I have a final few words about pornography's impact on couples' relationship. Our research group has conducted two studies involving approximately 700 men and women who are in couples in which one or both members use pornography. When asked the open-ended question, “What effect, if any, has pornography had on your couple relationship?”, the most common answer by a very wide margin was no effect, followed by reports of positive effects, and trailed by a minority of reports of negative effects.

Also relevant to the impact or lack of impact of Internet pornography on the couple relationship is that in both Canada and the U.S., rates of divorce per thousand marriages have continued their decline—and they've been in decline—since the inception of widespread access to Internet pornography.

How am I doing for time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

You have 42 seconds.

[Dr. William Fisher]

Let me conclude by thanking you for your attention. I'd be happy to converse with you further about this during the question period.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you for your action-packed presentation.

Now we move to Dr. Kim Roberts for a 10-minute opening.

[Dr. Kim Roberts, Professor and Head, Child Memory Lab, Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual]

Thank you for inviting me here. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can contribute to this committee.

My take is a bit different from Dr. Fisher's. I am a professor in child psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo. My main area of expertise is in children's memory and learning. I apply that research in forensic arenas and also in educational arenas.

Prosecution rates of those who have abused children are exceptionally low. I've heard estimates in Canada in the range of about 2% for successful prosecutions. There are several reasons for this. Child sexual abuse is not as high profile a prosecution as, let's say, homicide. Unlike other crimes, child sexual abuse usually has no evidence associated with it. There's usually very little physical evidence. There's no other medical evidence, unless it's something like a child has contracted a similar strain of a sexually transmitted disease as the alleged perpetrator. There are no other witnesses usually, and the alleged perpetrator will almost always deny the allegation. The evidence that the police are left with is what the child says, the child's testimony.

Many young children don't understand what's happened to them, so young children could not distinguish a case of fondling from a case of being touched while they're being bathed, for example. Also, the quality of investigation is unfortunately quite poor. I've just conducted a study funded by the ministry of the Attorney General in which we surveyed the entire country—every territory, every province—to look at the state of training that investigators get. How much do they know about child development and how much of what they've learned do they put into practice? It turns out that they're very knowledgeable. They know what they should be doing to get the right descriptions from children about what happened, but in practice nothing changes. I put that down to a lack of resources, essentially. There's no follow-up training.

Many of these children do not see any justice. That obviously has a psychological effect on them and the way that they can deal with what's happened to them for their rest of their lives. It's even worse when you take into account that the most vulnerable group for child sexual abuse is the children with disabilities, thus children who are non-verbal and children who have other intellectual disabilities. Most often the crown prosectors will say there's no point in taking the case any further as there's very little chance of prosecution.

I want to mention next that I've worked with police. I taught for eight years at the Ontario Police College. I worked at the National Institutes of Health, on the NICHD protocol of interviewing children, a protocol that is based from developmental knowledge. It's used throughout the entire Province of Quebec for investigators to interview children. So I've seen literally thousands of cases of children's descriptions of what may or may not have happened and, obviously, I understand the psychological effects, which I'm sure I don't need to explain are quite severe for a lot of these children.

When you bring the discussion to the digital era, things get much more complex and much more serious. You may have had a child who has been abused and for several years there may or may not have been some sort of legal involvement. Either way, there must have been some sense of their either having been able to have therapy or having worked through it themselves, or their trying to negotiate the whole family situation—who lives there, who does not live there anymore, and that kind of thing. But let's say you're abused as a child, and you're now a teenager, a young person, an adult, and maybe you have children of your own, and someone says to you, “You look familiar. Have I seen you somewhere before?” Can you imagine what goes through their mind when someone says that to them, knowing that embarrassing, nude pictures of them, pictures of them in sexually compromising positions, have been passed around the Internet who knows how many times?

This is the result of an underground network where these pictures are passed along, and the idea is that the people involved in that network can receive materials from other people only if they upload their own materials.

This is why you have cases with fathers, uncles, and grandparents videotaping sexual acts with children in their care, giving demonstrations of how to penetrate an eight-year-old, for example. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this because I understand what it's like when someone puts an image like that in your head. I can go into detail, if you wish me to do so, later.

These are really quite serious crimes. Because that child may have already gone through the process of trying to get themselves back to a psychologically healthy place, which in itself is a challenge, once this starts again, either when photographs come to light, or when there's a prosecution of someone who is using those photographs, the victim has to be notified and this starts all over for them.

My main point here is that any trauma that children might feel from being abused is not just a one-time thing. It's not just when they remember the abuse that things are bad. This is a lifelong thing for them. It affects their self-esteem, the way they try to develop their self-identity in their teenage years, and the way their attachment relationships have been completely disrupted, because they're usually abused by somebody they know. It's often a family member, or a step-parent, for example. For that to go on through their adult life, the costs to Canada are going to be enormous.

We don't yet have all of the research, because there hasn't been enough time for us to see the actual consequences. In terms of things like depression, long waiting lists to get access to health care, there being no money for private care, and years spent in the legal system and lost days in the workplace, and the increased number of unskilled workers—because some of these women cannot concentrate on an education or a job—all of these things cost our society a lot of money.

What I'll end on is that this is a lifelong issue with lifelong consequences.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much.

I would like to welcome Dr. Neil Malamuth. Can you hear us?

[Professor Neil Malamuth, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, As an Individual]

Yes, I can.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Dr. Malamuth is a professor of communication studies, psychology, and women’s studies at the University of California. I understand you're in Peoria, Arizona today. Is that correct?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

That's where I am.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much for joining us. We have an opening period of 10 minutes for you to make some comments, and then we'll refer to the members for questions after your 10-minute introduction.

Thank you for participating.

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

Thank you for the opportunity of sharing some of our research findings.

I've been involved in this research program for about 40 years now. It primarily focuses on the characteristics of men in the general population who are more likely to commit acts of sexual aggression against women. In the process, we've developed a model that we call a “confluence model”, which examines the various risks and protective factors that make an individual more likely to be at risk for committing such acts of sexual aggression.

As parts of this confluence model, where we look at the interaction of multiple factors, we have identified what we call, relatively, “primary” factors, and then also there are secondary factors. Within that general framework, we've studied how pornography exposure may increase the risk for committing acts of sexual aggression.

In that overall framework, pornography exposure is considered a secondary factor. There are other factors that we consider more formative and primary. The role of pornography exposure, particularly when you focus on non-consenting pornography—where we looked at other kinds as well and, more recently, child pornography—by and large we see as priming or activating certain risk characteristics the person already may have based on the primary factors.

The overall conclusion suggests that if a person is at relatively high risk, based on the primary factors that we've been studying, then exposure to certain kinds of pornography, particularly non-consenting pornography, as well as, for certain individuals, child pornography, and some other types of pornography as well, may add fuel to the fire, so to speak. If a person already has that kind of risk, then heavy pornography exposure in particular may make them considerably more likely to have attitudes accepting of violence against women and also to act out under some circumstances in sexually aggressive ways.

As for the methodologies we've used, in recognizing the limitations of not being able to do the ideal scientific kind of study, you have to use multiple methods. The ideal study obviously would be unethical, such as, let us say, to randomly assign a group of boys at a young age to heavy pornography exposure or no pornography exposure and then track their behaviour over many years. Because that is unethical and impossible, we have used many different kinds of methodologies, including survey studies, laboratory studies where we can do random assignment, including field experiments, where we can do some degree of random assignment, including longitudinal studies.

Overall, the data have converged I think to a large degree from these multiple methods that complement each other to show that, indeed, if a person already is at relatively higher risk, then exposure to certain kinds of pornography—particularly, again, heavy exposure—increases the risk and makes them more likely both to hold attitudes accepting of violence against women and, in some cases, to actually act out in a sexually aggressive manner.

With those introductory remarks, I'll be glad to amplify my comments and to take any questions. Let me add that currently the technician that is supposed to run the equipment hasn't arrived and won't arrive for another 12 minutes or so.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much.

We're going to start our questioning for seven minutes with Mr. Oliver.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to the three of you for your testimony and for coming to Ottawa, or joining us from Arizona.

The sponsor of the motion who has put this topic before the committee has indicated that the federal government should take a leadership role in addressing the public health effects of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material.

Dr. Fisher, if I understood your testimony, there are no studies or proof of correlation. Is that what I heard? Are you concluding that there is no public health effect?

[Dr. William Fisher]

As my colleague Dr. Malamuth has suggested, there are no perfect studies. This is an area that many scientists are concerned about and have approached in different ways. There is no perfect study.

What I've done in the last 10 minutes is to review multiple lines of evidence. We pointed out that correlational studies could mean either that people who view pornography are aggressive in a contributory way or that people who are aggressive like to look at pornography, and the confluence model study, which Dr. Malamuth has talked about, is one that we've actually replicated.

That is, people with, broadly speaking, anti-social personality traits who use more pornography report that they engage in more anti-woman aggression. The issue there it that, of course, that remains a correlational study and we don't know which way it's going.

As I pointed out during my remarks, when we actually add in a simple measure of men's sex drive, it knocks out the contribution of pornography in the context of anti-social personality traits, etc., so the science is far from settled.

What I can say is that we've had an incredible natural experiment that none of us asked for, and that involves the onset of essentially unlimited access by every man, woman, and child in Canada with, for example, their anti-social or pro-social or neutral personality characteristics, since about 1995. As I remarked, we look at a number of possible markers of what's going on. These are population-level data and they cannot tell us what's happening to any individual, but they can tell us almost on a policy basis what's going on in the context of unlimited access by Canadians and Americans.

From what we've reviewed, there's been a substantial decline in rates of sexual assault. This is not of sexual assault reported to the police; this is from victimization surveys. This is active surveillance, which the U.S. has continued throughout the era of Internet pornography. There has been no change in rates of sexual assault in Canada. We find that adolescents in Canada are not having sex any more often or at younger ages or with more partners. We find that the rate of divorce per thousand in Canada and the U.S. has continued to decline. And we actually find, in the context of the nationally representative U.S. data that our lab has analyzed, that egalitarian attitudes seem to co-vary or correlate with pornography use.

The issue, broadly speaking, is that the evidence is quite mixed. Every data point that I've talked about with you is from a published study, so that's where we stand.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you.

My own lens on this that I've come to is that it is a public health question. Who is most vulnerable? Who is most at risk? Apart from the people who are caught in images in which they are being treated violently sexually, it occurs to me that children accidentally viewing this kind of pornographic material can be affected.

Dr. Roberts, as a committee, we aren't really studying child sexual abuse; it would be the public health effect of exposure to violent or degrading sexually explicit material online. Do you have any evidence or any testimony related specifically to that, to the consequences of children stumbling onto a site on the Internet and being exposed to that? Do you have any testimony related to that specifically and not to sexual abuse?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

First of all, it's hard to compartmentalize child sexual abuse within the issue that you are looking at with adults, because very often the two go together. So if there is a house in which a child is being sexually abused, a lot of the time the mom is also being abused in some way, and often that is the only way to get prosecutions on child sexual abuse.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I'm just going to end on this.

My question was more about accidental exposure of a child to online violent and degrading sexually explicit material. Do you have any testimony relating specifically to the consequences for a child seeing such material?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

I haven't personally conducted any studies on that. I have read work by other people who have talked about it. It often depends on how closely a child will identify with it. If they see a child very similar to them—the same age, that kind of stuff—then it's going to hit home very hard for them and it will certainly bring fear and a belief that the world is not a safe place.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you for that.

Dr. Fisher or Dr. Malamuth, do either of you have any testimony related to accidental viewing by children? Have you seen any studies, any research, that would help us deal with that particular issue?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

I haven't seen research. I've heard a fair number of anecdotal examples of it, people indicating that it's happened in their family, but I've not seen any systematic studies.

May I comment for a moment on what Dr. Fisher said previously?

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Yes, absolutely.

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

Dr. Fisher and I have somewhat different views on what the overall literature indicates, and I'd like to just comment briefly on the two aspects he talked about.

In his study where it's said said they control for sex drive and the effects of pornography then disappeared, there is a serious confound wherein one of the key elements of how they define sex drive is how often you masturbate. A very large percentage of those masturbatory activities occur during the use of pornography. Consequently, of course, once you tease out that particular contribution, the effects of pornography or the role of pornography is going to disappear once we have separated those two in a semi- [Inaudible—Editor] writing up of the results, and indeed, pornography continues to have an impact.

Plus, I should point out that the conclusions I have stated are not based on any single study, and there are now a large number of meta-analyses that look across the different methodologies that have existed and summarize all the relevant studies and interview methodologies and dozens and dozens of studies that point to the same conclusion. Not only that, but it turns out that Dr. Fisher in his own writing—and I'd be glad to give you a citation—some years ago has argued for the conclusions that I presented that certain individuals are more anti-social; tendencies may indeed be affected, while the majority of people who are not may not be affected.

Second, Dr. Fisher refers to what we call aggregate studies, and as he noted, there's caution where you can say, well, at the societal level, there may have been an increase in pornography use, but there doesn't seem to be a corresponding increase in sex crimes and so forth.

Aggregate studies have a lot of problems, and this is well known, because there are many other changes occurring in the society at the same time. For example, it is probably the case that in the last 10 years, the number of guns in the United States has increased exponentially—I have data to show that—yet the rates of crime have actually decreased quite a bit, as everyone knows and nobody seems to have a good explanation for it. Does that mean that more guns are actually associated with less violence and in fact we can say that there might be some causes or that having more guns has not contributed to more violence? I think that would be a very precarious type of conclusion.

And no one is arguing, as I said, that pornography is a primary cause and that you can expect, with the gradual change in the availability of pornography, there to be some dramatic increase in levels of sexual assault. Indeed, sexual assault that's known to the police or that is adjudicated is generally committed more by what we call generalists: anti-social individuals who will commit a wide variety of acts that are illegal/anti-social and who are not necessarily specifically, sexually criminals.

In the case of the populations we've studied, men in the general population, they tend to be more specialists. And for them, as I emphasize, the data showed that, for the majority of men, pornography exposure does not really have any impact on their aggressive attitudes or their sexually aggressive tendencies or behaviour. But for an important subgroup, those who already have relatively high risk, this is a group for whom—as I said, consistent with Dr. Fisher's earlier writings and our own confluence model—the data, I think, are very clear that indeed exposure to certain kinds of pornography can increase their risk further.

To answer your question, coming back to the issue of of incidental exposure, as I said, I'm not aware of the publication of any actual studies on this. There were certainly many people who report this, and I could give you some of the anecdotal things that have been related to me by some colleagues and other people I have come in contact with.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I think anything anecdotal would be helpful.

Am I out of time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Sorry.

Dr. Carrie, you're splitting your time with Mr. Viersen.